Posthumous Collection Research Articles

A Note on Valentine Ackland

Sylvia Townsend Warner supplied this brief note on Valentine Ackland, for the posthumous collection of Ackland’s poetry, The Nature of the Moment (1973).

The Invisible Man of Indecency: Profanity and the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782)

AbstractThis essay analyses vulgarities in Ignatius Sancho's letters, which were collected and published posthumously (in 1782) by one of his correspondents to provide revenue for Sancho's widow and children. It proposes a role for Sancho in English letters never previously suggested: that he used sexual innuendo in the manner of Swift, Sterne and London playwrights to spur a number of patrons and benefactors to provide gifts of money, food and other necessities when he had difficulty feeding his children. The posthumous collection continued that effort but elided some of his frankness, possibly because Sancho's widow was involved in its publication.

Kamala Das

Kamala Das Suraiya (1934-2009), who also wrote under the pen name of Madhavikutty, was a bilingual writer from the South Indian state of Kerala and one of the most popular and most controversial poets of Indian English. As a major Indian poet of contemporary times, Das has attracted international attention by her bold and previously unarticulated expressions of womanhood. The recognition of Das as an Indian poet in English came with the PEN Asian Poetry Prize in 1963. Since then her poems have been published in many anthologies including the World Anthology of Living Poets (1973). Her initial poetry collections in English are: Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973) and Tonight, this Savage Rite (Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy, 1979). Many other collections were published subsequently, incorporating both new poems and poems from the above collections.Some of them are: Collected Poems (1984), The Best of Kamala Das (1991), Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996), Encountering Kamala (2007) and a posthumous collection, Wages of Love ed. Suresh Kohli in 2013. Collected Poems won the Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi) award in 1984. Other works in English include her novel, Alphabet of Lust (1976), her autobiography, My Story, and short stories A Doll for the Child Prostitute (1977) and Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992).The initial part of this literary dialogue on Kamala Das between Usha Kishore and Dr B. Hariharan took place at the Institute of English, Thiruvananthapuram, where Usha was on a study trip from Edinburgh Napier University. The following is an email dialogue, incorporating the initial face to face discourse.

Such Violent Laughter

Such Violent Laughter Alan Singer (bio) I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people, even myself, so I can't blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. … What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didn't do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesn't know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don't believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide? —Nathanael West (1975, 4) "What did I do to deserve such a terrible fate?" "Ought I commit suicide?" The questions are serious, and as we sometimes say, seriously funny. Harold Bloom's appreciation of the passage quoted above from Nathanael West's remarkable novel Miss Lonelyhearts, takes account of our relief that the violence suffered by the questioner is hers to endure. By the same token, Bloom does not flinch from the recognition that West's narrative conscientiousness wrings a confession from his readers, that the laughter is ours. How do we laugh at such existential violence without fearing for our lives? How else can we live? The peculiar discomfort Bloom registers in his reflection on West's greatness as a novelist turns out to be the aim of more than one twentieth century American fiction writer. One only has to quickly thumb through Bloom's writings in his posthumous collection The American Canon to pick out a conspicuous bloody thread. The essays on Nathanael West, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner configure themselves as a suite of reflections on what Bloom might argue is a uniquely American rapport with comic violence, though he doesn't deploy the term. One quickly understands that Bloom's enthusiasm for these authors individually and as a group derives from their syncretistic penchants for extorting laughter from our otherwise shocked witness to the most violent human actions. It is no coincidence that each of these authors is frequently mentioned in Bloom's appreciation of each of the others. More to the point, Gnosticism, a career long obsession of Bloom's, appears to be at the root of his experience reading of West, O'Connor, and Faulkner. From a Bloomian perspective, Gnosticism is arguably equivalent [End Page 479] to knowledge of our propensity for error and suffering. I would argue that it is oddly akin to Greek hamartia, the promise of corrigibility through experience. Bloom's readerly persistence through the trials of gnostic knowing is, thanks to Gershom Scholem's reliably paradoxical phrase, "redemption though sin, easily construed as acceptance of our entrapment in experience. The relevant sin here is especially cautionary for American readers who keep faith with the phantom of an American Adam. Sin is perforce the manner of human striving after more and more experience. What is redeemed is simply what is wrought through striving. Sin, after all is the refusal of death and transcendence. It is more durable. More to the point, it is do-able; it is brutal agency itself, unencumbered by the visionary spirits of romantic sublimity. In Bloom's opening essay on Emerson, the point is already taken: "Emerson is an experiential critic and essayist, and not a Transcendental philosopher" (Bloom 2019, 13). Bloom invites us to think of Emerson's American exemplarity (though he finds the same wisdom in the Bible, Shakespeare, Freud), as his acceptance of the confliction of experience. For Emerson "…we need to be everything in ourselves while we go on fearing that we are nothing in ourselves" (14). The literary imagination is quintessentially conflicted in the very impetus of the writer to imagine what is not the case. Of course the literary confliction that we know most terrifyingly, which is to say most violently, comes to us in the genre of tragedy where human agency hangs drastically in the balance. Oedipus is of course presumed to be mistaken about who he...

Catalogo tematico delle musiche di Niccolò Paganini. Aggiornamento ed. by Maria Rosa Moretti and Anna Sorrento

Reviewed by: Catalogo tematico delle musiche di Niccolò Paganini. Aggiornamento ed. by Maria Rosa Moretti and Anna Sorrento Paola Teresa Rossetti Catalogo tematico delle musiche di Niccolò Paganini. Aggiornamento. Edited by Maria Rosa Moretti and Anna Sorrento. Introduction and Appendices ed. by Maria Rosa Moretti. Milano: Musica con le ali, 2018 [xvi, 293 p. ISBN 978-88-943888-0-0. Donation of 50€] Replacing the legend surrounding Niccolò Paganini’s life with factual truth and accessing the sources revealing the uniqueness of his music output has been a lengthy, if yet unfinished, painstaking task. Only a small part of the composer’s works were published during his lifetime and we owe our current knowledge to the efforts of passionate scholars, who have applied scientific rigour to collate and study the compositions of the Genoese virtuoso, a sizeable portion of which was—and still is—scattered in various locations and collections. Much light has been cast since the 1972 acquisition by the Italian Government of the substantial collection of Paganini’s manuscripts, formerly held overseas and subsequently entrusted to the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. A milestone in the reconstruction of the composer’s creative trail was Maria Rosa Moretti and Anna Sorrento’s Catalogo tematico delle musiche di Niccolò Paganini (Comune di Genova: Genoa, 1982), the thematic catalogue (CT) published for the composer’s bicentenary, listing his complete works. The two scholars compiled more than 180 entries at the time, each belonging to one of the following categories: dated works, undated works, sketches, lost works, doubtful works, and falsely attributed works. New sources becoming available, technologies improving image quality and, last but not least, a host of research papers issued over the years, have all resulted in yet another commendable achievement by these two scholars: the Catalogo tematico delle musiche di Niccolò Paganini. Aggiornamento (CTA), which updates the 1982 catalogue. As the authors explain in setting out their objectives and organisational criteria (p. x), the latest undertaking is not to be regarded as a revised edition replacing the 1982 volume. CTA was designed to bring the publication in line with current knowledge on Paganini’s musical legacy—enriching, rather than devaluing the catalogue issued almost four decades ago. New works discovered or validated after 1982 are listed in CTA, Part 1, whereas updates and amendments to the entries listed in CT are to be found in Part 2. CT thus remains an indispensable resource, complemented by the later discoveries carefully endorsed by the two scholars. While Moretti and Sorrento’s continuous findings were conveyed to the musicological community in a number of articles issued after 1982, the new publication expands on them even further, incorporating thirty-six years of solid research. The joined consultation of CT and CTA provides a 360 degree view, so to speak, of the works listed: title and medium, thematic incipit, date of composition, description and history of music sources, dedication, publishing details, successive elaboration, specialised literature, and archival sources, including journals citing public performances. Moretti and Sorrento have meticulously tracked down the provenance of the, often dismembered, music sources through the vicissitudes of what is known as the Posthumous [End Page 275] Collection. Music manuscripts, instruments, and memorabilia belonging to Paganini were, famously, donated or sold by his descendants, the legacy ending up in many different hands and places. Significantly richer than its 1982 version, the new history of the Posthumous Collection (Storia della Collezione postuma, appendix 2, pp. 236–246) is one of several resources extending the scope of the publication beyond that of a simple thematic catalogue. With constant cross-references from one entry to another, CT and CTA constitute an integrated corpus similar in conception to an online database with links, open to future discoveries and further expansion. But readers will certainly appreciate the beautiful printed edition. The publisher, Musica con le ali, has committed to maintaining the physical features of the 1982 volume, and we find the excellent quality paper, printing, and binding highly praised in former reviews of CT (by Robert Anderson, The Musical Times 128, no. 1733 [July 1987]: 386– 387, online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/964533 [accessed 28 August 2020] and by Clive Brown, Music and Letters...

Из литературного быта 1920-х годов: круг журнала «Гермес»

The essay reconstructs history of a literary circle of authors united under the auspices of Hermes, a typewritten magazine edited in Moscow in the first half of the 1920s. These “poets- philologists” published three full issues of the magazine, 12 copies each. The fourth issue was prepared in just one copy and the authors considered it “unpublished.” Later they edited two typewritten almanacs: Mnemosyne and Hyperborean. The first part of the essay describes how the fourth and last issue of Hermes was collected and edited. Its preparation was accompanied by dramatic encumbrances caused by both external and internal circumstances, the most tragic of which was the death of Maksim Kenigsberg (1900–1924) one of the founders of the Hermes circle. Nina Wolkenau (1901‒1973?), who took his place as a chief editor was forced to cease the publication. The second part of the essay discusses the composition of authors represented in the fourth issue of Hermes, in particular those who joined the magazine from other Moscow literary associations, like Kifara and Green Lamp. Further, the table of contents of that “unpublished” issue is presented here with necessary commentary. A separate supplement is dedicated to a collection of poems by the authors of Hermes, either dedicated to members of this association, or directly related to the magazine itself. The third part of the essay, Addenda ad volumen, complements previous scholarly incursions regarding the circle of Hermes with the unpublished materials from the final issue of the magazine. These are Nina Wolkenau’s review of Mikhail Kuzmin’s book Novyi Gul’ (Leningrad, 1924), and Maksim Kenigsberg’s discussion of Pavel Muratov’s collection of novellas Moralí (Berlin, 1923), where he also wrote about Kuzmin’s art of prose. Another publication is Lev Gornung’s review of the posthumous collection of Nikolai Gumiliov’s poems K Sinei Zvezde (Berlin, 1923) Gornung published another version of that review in a printed “almanac of poetry and criticism” Even and Odd (Moscow, 1925) edited by the same circle of authors, as Hermes. The final supplement includes two other reviews of the Gumiliov’s collection. The émigré publication of K Sinei Zvezde was a significant event in the Soviet underground culture. The poems included in this book became a “lovers’ code” for young Russian readers of the 1920s.

Irish Heritage in the Literary Remains of Frank Yerby and Henry James

AbstractThis essay investigates how Irish heritage—during the long historical epoch of British colonization—figured into the literary works of Frank Yerby and Henry James. Autobiographical connections and literary affinities between these authors are illuminated and contextualized by, among other published sources, the posthumous collection of essays by the latter novelist’s father, The Literary Remains of the late Henry James (1884). While scholars are newly investigating intersections between Henry James’s oeuvre and African American literature, Yerby’s enormously popular fiction has remained by and large estranged from this new direction in Jamesian studies. When read alongside Henry James, Sr.’s unfinished autobiography featured in the Literary Remains and related nonfictional texts, Yerby’s first novel and commercial best-seller, Foxes of Harrow (1946), seems to share an eerie amount in common with both the James family’s history and their humble Irish origins. Moreover, Yerby’s narrative curiously parallels the cross-racial solidarity the Jameses were regularly credited for in the one hundred years following the American Civil War.

Dernière escale de Léon-Gontran Damas : Autour d’une saynète sur l’Amérindien en France

This article focuses on the posthumous collection by the poet Léon-Gontran Damas, Mine de riens, re-titled Dernière escale and published in 2012. Alternating between the short form of the haiku and the long form, this collection is close to a playlet. In it, Damas mocks three phenomena that have marked France: the image of the Other as inferior, the Westerner represented as superior to Guyanese customs, and colonial zoos at world exhibitions. In his work, the poet calls for a reconsideration of the image of Native Americans and is also considered as a precursor of creolisation.

Italo Calvino e l'epistemologia "continentale": I racconti "I cinque sensi"

Calvino’s posthumous collection of tales, The five senses, is analyzed with an emphasis on closeness to European epistemological and philosophical experiences. The little system of the short stories is related to Michel Serres book “Les cinq sens” (1985): We don’t know if Calvino read it, but the topics addressed in this essay, namely the complexity of sensitive experience and the epistemology of living beings, belong to a cultural environment familiar to Calvino.

A Contextualist History of Cartesian Philosophy: Roger Ariew’s Descartes and the First Cartesians

A Contextualist History of Cartesian Philosophy: Roger Ariew’s <i>Descartes and the First Cartesians</i>

Poetic Physics (Poetische Naturwissenschaft)

This article deals with Martin Opitz’s didactic poem Vesuvius (1633) and tries to elucidate its fundamental poetical and epistemological issues. In his Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (1624), Opitz establishes a set of rules for the genre of carmen heroicum that comprises both didactic poetry and narrative epics. Especially didactic resp. scientific poetry plays a decisive role in Opitz’s overall concept of poetry as it denies being fiction (‘Erdichtung’) and claims strict factuality. Thus it is not surprising that Vesuvius becomes the opening piece of the posthumous collection of Opitz’s Teutsche Poemata (1644). Vesuvius reveals itself not only as an imitation / translation of De Aetna (a didactic poem included in the Appendix Vergiliana), but also as an attempt to connect literary tradition, natural philosophy and religious knowledge: The purely scientific parts of the poem (on earthquakes and volcanism) are functioning to reveal the natural order of creation (the aspect of theodicy avant la lettre). The Vesuv-catastrophe is interpreted as God’s clear hint for mankind towards the ending of moral deprivation and civil war. The poet’s role as poeta vates resp. poeta theologus is thus to be the mediator / translator / interpreter between god and mankind, a mediation which actually takes the form of philological interpretation and commentary. The text of the 1633 print reflects this constellation by interweaving text and paratext (commentary) to a unique ensemble. With its particular textual arrangement and discoursive complexity, Vesuvius is symptomatic for premodern negotiations between natural sciences, religious knowledge, and literature.

Watching the Great Gears Turn: Tall, Majumudar, Shewmaker, Bonner, Kennedy

Watching the Great Gears Turn:Tall, Majumudar, Shewmaker, Bonner, Kennedy Stephen Kampa (bio) A posthumous collection presents the same sorts of problems that collections of elegies do: a reader must bring the critical faculties to bear on something presented as art, yet the reader, like the writer, is human. How can one read such human documents as these without seeming inhuman through a criticism of diction or gripes about tropes? I have been glad to avoid writing about such books—Donald Hall's Without, Mary Jo Bang's Elegy, Gjertrud Schnackenberg's Heavenly Questions—but I have before me Deborah Tall's last book, Afterings, and I find myself in the unfortunate position of writing about a posthumous collection: a book that—by its nature, humanly speaking—sounds like a series of elegies for the self. This is not to say that the book itself is loaded with self-referential laments, but rather that all of these words will strike the knowing reader as last words, and last words tend to assume disproportionate importance. ("We owe a cock to Asclepius.") That being said, there are poems here that strike the elegiac note, and the word "aftermath" crops up more than once in this brief book. Given all that finality, I wish the book were better. I do admire certain aspects of Tall's work. She has, at times, a terrific ear—"From the ankles up / mis-angled," for example, or "each eyed / ephemeron, each / graphic bite mark / and decrypted inch of ground"—and I was struck on occasion by the aptness of her philosophical speculations: "What part solitude / is shame?" Her feel for the resonance of a word, for words' puns and puzzles, can be superb, as when she writes of "the rot that lurks in approximation" (we [End Page 291] note that r-o-t, in order, appear in "approximation"). Her gifts come together in "The Odd End of Days," a poem bearing this epigraph: "Today, 11/19/99, is the last day of your life that all of the digits of the date will be odd." It's all on display: her ear (a subtle rhyme of "body part" with "passport"), her metaphysical speculation, and her lexical depth. The final stanza reads, "From here on / we pay our respects / to aftermath," and that last word—loaded with the knowledge that, in some sense, all of our days are the aftermath of prior, significant days; that there must be something that transcends the merely mathematical, that comes after math; and that this is a poem in a posthumous collection—reverberates until it finds a mate in the final stanza of the final poem of the book ("Echo Factor"): "Before Echo / there was no love / of aftermaths." That is Tall at her best. Elsewhere, the collection is less inspiring. She has an irritating habit of using line breaks instead of commas in some places but not others, muddying her syntax, and she favors a phrasal free verse with regular sharp enjambments to distract from the general prosodic monotony. More than once, the best lines in a poem are borrowed: It would be finehere if it werefine here he wrote, everyonedead or dyingor just walking around. Those italicized bits, taken from letters by one Alfred Dove, rather steal the show. Occasionally, a poem doesn't live up to its promise: "Daughters," about the death of a woman's mother, includes the lines: No one is barring death's doorwith her own body. Nowshe is sole guardianpushing back her own daughters. [End Page 292] The lines are marvelous in that it is the daughters who need pushing back, as though they were eager to step through that door. The rest of the poem is a letdown. Perhaps hardest to put one's finger on is why or how so many other poems fail to leave any impression at all. I am not up to the task of such apophatic criticism. Reading a posthumous collection is a humbling experience. One recognizes the high stakes and long odds of a life lived for art. Perhaps it is just that combination that invites us to admire that so...

Doors into Elf-mounds: J.R.R. Tolkien's Introductions, Prefaces, and Forewords

Doors into Elf-mounds:J.R.R. Tolkien's Introductions, Prefaces, and Forewords Janet Brennan Croft (bio) Tolkien wrote many forewords, prefaces, and introductory notes over his long career, both to his own and to others' works. This "paratextual" material is often overlooked but is quite interesting in its own right when examined as a body. Writing an introduction for another's work is what Diana Pavlac Glyer (adopting terms from the work of Karen Burke LeFevre) would call the act of a "resonator"—a form of collaboration (in the broadest sense of collaboration) that encourages, supports, and promotes the work of another writer (68–69) and is especially valuable coming from an established scholar sponsoring the work of someone relatively new to the field. In Tolkien's case, for many of these works he was also an "editor," even if not acknowledged as such on the title page, who took care to read the manuscript carefully and "offer feedback or advice that result[ed] in very specific changes" (101), in some instances even working with the author over a period of years. Much of this work was with editions of primary texts, and as Tom Shippey points out, In the modern academic world, editing [a primary text] is often regarded as a low-prestige occupation, not requiring the literary skills for a successful monograph. [But] Editing is the foundation, the most important part of bringing ancient works and forgotten authors back to life. All the rest is merely superstructure. (41) Editing for Tolkien was therefore not only a form of collaboration with the person creating the edition, but with the long-dead original author or transcriber of the piece as well. The paratextual material associated with his own writing then takes us to another level of collaboration, where the author steps outside his own work to play the role of pseudo-editor.1 [End Page 177] Non-Fiction "Note." 1918. In A Spring Harvest, by Geoffrey Bache Smith. London: Erskine MacDonald, 1918. 7. About 150 words. The first foreword Tolkien published was his "Note" introducing a posthumous collection of poetry by his close friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, who died of gas gangrene following minor shrapnel wounds in France at the end of 1916 (Anderson 617). Smith was one of the core members of the T.C.B.S., Tolkien's group of friends from King Edward's School, and an early encourager of Tolkien's writing; serious-minded, his ambition was that the group would "re-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty" (quoted in Garth 105) through their writings. Upon Smith's death, Tolkien began implementing his friend's wish (passed on by Smith's mother) to have his poetry published. Tolkien served as editor, assisted by their mutual friend Christopher Wiseman, and R. W. Reynolds, one of their instructors at King Edward's, helped find a publisher (Anderson 617). Hammond and Anderson report that Wiseman claimed Tolkien did all the editing but wanted to share the credit, but in the end neither of their names is formally listed as editor (281). The collection, titled A Spring Harvest (a reference to a life cut short in early youth by war), was published in 1918. Tolkien's introductory note is brief and primarily concerned with explaining the origin and order of the poems, including when and where they were written. But in conjunction with the all-too-short chronology of Smith's life facing the title page, Tolkien's mention that many poems were written in France during a year "broken by one leave in the middle of May" and that the final version of the concluding poem, "The Burial of Sophocles," was "sent [to Tolkien] from the trenches," is particularly poignant. Tolkien concludes that "beyond these few facts no prelude and no envoi is needed" (7). What is left unsaid is that Smith spent two days of that May 1916 leave with Tolkien and his wife Edith, who had married only two months previously. The young men met several times when both were in France, the last time in August, though they kept up a frequent correspondence until a few weeks before...

To die a guest at home: on Oh my name, stand and walk on! A posthumous collection of the works of Nakaya Kōkichi

ABSTRACTNakaya Kokichi is a writer whose work illustrates a singular unfolding of intellectual thought in Okinawa under the US military occupation. This article sheds light on the political potential of Nakaya’s thoughts through a close reading of his posthumous collection. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the three aspects of his thought. First, Nakaya’s texts reveal the violent nature of “interpellation” that sustains the system of the US–Japan military alliance. Nakaya’s work exposes the way in which such interpellation at once subject those who live in Okinawa and, therefore, prohibits them from becoming political subjects. Second, Nakaya’s writings critique the politics of Okinawan nationalist identity and seek an alternative political future in the solidarity among non-subjectified bodies. Third, Nakaya’s thoughts suggest a paradoxical possibility of Kakushi, or a death in a foreign land even in one’s own so-call “homeland,” once that helps to resituate Okinawa as an intersection of “refugees,” who remain unable to belong to nation-states, and their “histories that open up laterally.”

Indecoro, anacronismo, utopía: Sobre la poesía de Manuel Ramos Otero

This essay offers a political reading of the poetry of Manuel Ramos Otero, focusing on its formal aspects instead of its content and themes, which have traditionally been the center of critical attention. After studying the Puerto Rican author's use of the life and poetry of Luis Cernuda as a mask for his own ethics of marginality, in which breaking the rules of social decorum becomes an act of resistance, the essay goes on to expand that very same notion of decorum to a formal category, analyzing Ramos Otero's trajectory from El libro de la muerte—heavily influenced by both Anglo-American modernism and Latin American modernismo—to Invitación al polvo, which in an apparent paradox draws upon less modern influences, such as a popularist strand of Spanish Baroque poetry and traditional Puerto Rican and Latin American popular music lyrics. Rather than centering on Ramos Otero's poetic chronicling of his struggle with AIDS, the formal anachronism in the Puerto Rican's posthumous poetry collection is read alongside the traumatic neoliberalization of the city of New York—where Ramos Otero resided—specifically through the lens of his romantic relationship with José, a Cuban blue-collar migrant. In its conclusion, the essay argues that, by opposing neoliberal modernization and the transformations and invisibilizations in the work sphere it brings about, Ramos Otero resorts to a politically charged (and anachronistic) use of poetry as manual, artisanal labor.

The Elephants Have Been Singing All Along / Elefantene har sunget hele tiden by Elrik Lodén

a kind of poetry that seems bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Ren Powell. The Elephants Have Been Singing All Along / Elefantene har sunget hele tiden. Trans. Elrik Lodén. Stavanger, Norway. Wigestrand Forlag. 2017. 117 pages. A California-born poet, nonfiction essayist , translator, dramaturge, and teaching artist, Ren Powell is today at home on the west coast of Norway. Complementing six books of poetry and more than two dozen book translations, her poems have been published in six languages and her dramatic works performed in the US, Canada, and Norway. Her latest bilingual book, with its untranslated introduction in Norwegian, confirms the broad recognition she has received in her adoptive country. Already known for her vivid imagery, fluid poetic structure, and focus on women’s cultural traditions, she continues to tell essential female stories. The Elephants Have Been Singing All Along is a manifesto about middle-aged women, a circular story rooted in the beginning and the end of a woman’s life-giving time. The protagonist is the body; its resistance to tell its story reduces the poems to mere palimpsestic announcements, to a genealogy of the story that nonetheless teases out the body’s relationship with the mind, senses, nature, space, and time. Perhaps it is this birthing process that the singing elephants are accompanying. The book’s first part is devoted to searching for the body and framing it in a geometrically defined space closed by the “Once upon a time” that begins and closes each of its life phases. The body is examined in its substance and density, through the skin’s “geography of aging” and through the paradigm of beauty, this “choreography of doubt and faith and compounds.” The body is both particles and waves, as in quantum physics’ double slit theory. It takes leave of the concrete; untethered, it waits for its journey of discovery, sensing the “ripple in the surface tension” that precedes earthquakes. Triggered by temporal or verbal shifts (as in the italicized text on page 22, which is an echo of earlier poems), the poems are likewise fragmented particles and smooth waves that displace mental boundaries. The second part of the book is dedicated to following and defining the new body as connected to a myriad of micro-organisms, part of a vast universe in which it vibrates “like the cicada’s haunting buzz.” The body becomes an illusion and memories are a choreographed dream of paradise, ready to discover itself. The nine poems of the third and final part of the book chronicle the body’s journey through an initiatic door, a glorious passage to freedom, immateriality , balance, nothingness, and immortality. No longer needed, the story disappears. The open-endedness of the search and the alternance of fragmentation and connectedness tell the phenomenology of aging effectively, albeit indirectly in a poetic farandole that paints a mythical tableau of womanhood. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Diann Blakely. Lost Addresses: New and Selected Poems. Cliffs of Moher, Ireland. Salmon Poetry. 2017. 110 pages. Diann Blakely’s words are steeped in Anglican liturgy and the deep formalism and dense words of contemporary southern American poets. Each of her poems is as thick as the Tennessee woods, and one can imagine her, pen to notebook, on the mountain at Sewanee, imagining each descant and collect, each sonnet and villanelle. The posthumous collection Lost Addresses Fiona Sampson Limestone Country Little Toller British poet and writer Fiona Sampson is beloved for the lyricism and scope of her writing, and Limestone Country is no exception. Turning her insightful eye toward the very ground upon which four disparate communities in France, Slovenia, England, and Israel rest, Sampson interrogates not only humanity’s relationship to the environments it inhabits but how those environments shape the way humanity relates to itself. Yogesh Patel Swimming with Whales Skylark Publications UK Divided into three sections—At Sea, On Land, and Skyward—Patel’s book swims along with real whales and metaphorical ones as they roam free in their “liquid cage”and find “the sea of better sense”by connecting us with our consciousness. When the creature gets “Naturalised as...

EL COS ENTRE NÉIXER, DESNÉIXER I MORIR A MERCÈ RODOREDA, MARIA-MERCÈ MARÇAL I IMMA MONSÓ

This article brings together the first chapter of La placa del Diamant by Merce Rodoreda; the poems which deal with the mother figure in Maria-Merce Marcal’s posthumous collection Rao del cos; and a key part of Imma Monso’s novel Un home de paraula, in which the narrator’s beloved husband suddenly dies in front of her eyes. The three texts are analyzed through meaningful intertextual connections regarding the representation of the body and the problematic space for the maternal in Western culture. Moreover, they are identified as narratives of mourning in a way that problematizes the Freudian distinction between the supposedly healthy process of mourning and the allegedly pathological process of melancholia.

“Henry's brilliant sister”: The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother's Posthumous Publications

Ever since the publication of Henry Thoreau's four posthumous essay collections, bibliographers and biographers have credited Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the case of Excursions (1863), or William Ellery Channing, in the case of The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866), with either editing the collections or co-editing them with Sophia Thoreau, Henry's younger sister. This essay provides evidence from letters, books, diaries, and articles, as well as from the essay manuscripts themselves, that Sophia Thoreau alone edited her brother's essay collections for publication after his death from tuberculosis in 1862. She alone also chose the editor for her brother's Journal before her death in 1876.

And yet essays by Christopher Hitchens

navigated the flux of his inner life, which included everything—observations, emotions , places visited, conversations overheard , texts old and new, and experiences personal and shared—that came together to form the man who gave his name to an age. One hopes Young Tom is just the first installment of what promises to be the definitive life. Eliot may never have so understanding a biographer. Bernard F. Dick Fairleigh Dickinson University Christopher Hitchens. and yet . . . essays. New York. Simon & Schuster. 2015. 339 pages. Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011 from cancer, long before publication of four dozen of his previously uncollected essays, all commissioned by some blue-ribbon sources. The lowercase title with open punctuation of this posthumous collection signifies Hitchens’s ability to qualify his polemical arguments, virtually as if he were thinking a new idea on the instant, with utmost celerity and clarity. Devastatingly ironic, vitally analytical, the essays (many of which are book-review articles) create an anthology of pugnacious or mocking rhetorical punishment for assorted subjects: national and international politics, national security, the American Deep South (“where all politics is yokel”), NASCAR events (where God is popularly regarded as “a Republican, with a good chance of being white”), Thanksgiving (of which he approved), Christmas (which he detested), the Fox network, etc. His venom is always potent (especially against the Clintons, Saddam Hussein, and Hezbollah), but history has already come to mock several of his arguments—none so much, perhaps, as his virtually hysterical championing of the second Gulf War, a crime that is most responsible for the current chaos in the Middle East. To his credit, he did not refrain from self-criticism or self-satire—as his Vanity Fair essays on physical self-improvement show with deadly, hilarious efficacy. His piece on the agonies of Brazilian waxing should be compulsory entertainment for the most serious essayists, while his descriptions of his own ugly physical attributes show that his malice did not spare even himself. But politics were his bedrock, as displayed in splendid essays on Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somalian survivor of genital mutilation and civil war), Gertrude Bell (who created the map of Iraq), Rosa Luxemburg (the “most brilliant of Marxist intellectuals ”), Oriana Fallaci’s incomparable art of the interview, Chesterton’s reactionary sensibility , Arthur Schlesinger’s role as courtier -apologist, Erdoğan’s “xenophobic demagoguery ” (alas, he makes no comparable comment on Netanyahu’s), and Obama’s cool-cat quality (until disenchantment sets in). Politics also supplied a crucial layer in his literary criticism of Forster, Rushdie , Naipaul, Paul Scott, and Ian Fleming, but Hitchens remained a superior stylist, demonstrating a rare literary sensitivity to Joan Didion’s “blues” and Charles Dickens’s “inner child.” An intellectual omnivore (like Clive James), Hitchens almost matched Orwell in intellectual integrity and independence, while also coming as close as anybody has (to quote his own words on Edmund Wilson) to making “the labour of criticism into an art.” Keith Garebian Mississauga, Ontario Krisztián Nyáry. Merész magyarok, 30 emberi történet. Budapest. Corvina. 2015. 278 pages. Merész magyarok (Bold Hungarians) is Krisztián Nyáry’s second collection of sketches and short essays within two years. It Eugene Vodolazkin Laurus Trans. Lisa Hayden Oneworld Fifteenth-century Europe serves as the vast stage for a roving Russian healer who leaves his village on a journey of repentance, turmoil, and growth toward Jerusalem. Vodolazkin’s expertise in the medieval world rounds out this tale that defies the restrictions of this longago time and place in its treatment of universal human pains and regrets. Ivan Vladislavić The Folly Archipelago Books A mysterious interloper with big plans disrupts the quiet, restrained domestic life of Mr. and Mrs. Malgas in the suburbs of South Africa. The unsettling yet compelling nature of their new neighbor draws the characters into his proposals. Mr. and Mrs. Malgas begin to abandon their unquestioning complacency, a process that could be dangerous or revitalizing. Vladislavić skillfully crafts characters and an intriguing plot in what seems like an ordinary, bland world. Nota Bene WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 109 ...

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford

108 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 US Southwest, a literature that “negotiates between Anglo society and the Mexican community” in search of its own identity. A key component of this type of literature is that it bridges frontiers because writers and readers are continuously crossing over political, social, and cultural boundaries in search of a community of their own. Bonazzi comments that in “these narratives of otherness, we begin to hear the emerging chorus of genuine diversity.” Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries excels in its analytical commentaries because there are selections from a diverse group of writers that represent a unique style of writing and a rich thematic approach. José Banuelos Montes Roanoke College Robert Crawford. Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 493 pages. In his essay on Philip Massinger, T. S. Eliot wrote that good poets steal but convert their thefts into something new or at least different. Robert Crawford has shown that they also absorb whatever impinges on their consciousness. By tracing the arc of Eliot’s life from his St. Louis boyhood to the publication of The Waste Land, Crawford has opened the vaults of Eliot’s memory bank, releasing his myriad influences. His Eliot, whom he affectionately calls Tom, was the youngest of six siblings, including four sisters. He was a bookish lad whose mother also wrote poetry and whose father quoted Latin. He was girlshy but, like most adolescents, hormonal and eager to lose his virginity. If one feels currents of sexuality rippling throughout The Waste Land with its motifs of impotence , sterility, mechanical lovemaking, lost innocence, and even homosexuality (Mr. Eugenides propositioning the speaker ), Crawford supplies evidence that Eliot was much obsessed with sex, quoting his scatological limericks that can still evoke a blush. Although Crawford has tracked down Eliot’s sources, he presents his findings in a conversational way, as if the reader were in his seminar, and Crawford is sharing his research with colleagues, suggesting that Prufrock’s surname may have been inspired by the Prufrock Furniture Company in St. Louis and that Eliot’s fascination with the Grail myth may have originated with Bullfinch ’s Legends of King Arthur. Family and friends may have thought of him as Tom, but within the boy was a poet who, like Prufrock, had an inner and outer self. Within Tom Eliot was T. S. Eliot who, as Crawford shows, kept evolving as he World Literature in Review navigated the flux of his inner life, which included everything—observations, emotions , places visited, conversations overheard , texts old and new, and experiences personal and shared—that came together to form the man who gave his name to an age. One hopes Young Tom is just the first installment of what promises to be the definitive life. Eliot may never have so understanding a biographer. Bernard F. Dick Fairleigh Dickinson University Christopher Hitchens. and yet . . . essays. New York. Simon & Schuster. 2015. 339 pages. Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011 from cancer, long before publication of four dozen of his previously uncollected essays, all commissioned by some blue-ribbon sources. The lowercase title with open punctuation of this posthumous collection signifies Hitchens’s ability to qualify his polemical arguments, virtually as if he were thinking a new idea on the instant, with utmost celerity and clarity. Devastatingly ironic, vitally analytical, the essays (many of which are book-review articles) create an anthology of pugnacious or mocking rhetorical punishment for assorted subjects: national and international politics, national security, the American Deep South (“where all politics is yokel”), NASCAR events (where God is popularly regarded as “a Republican, with a good chance of being white”), Thanksgiving (of which he approved), Christmas (which he detested), the Fox network, etc. His venom is always potent (especially against the Clintons, Saddam Hussein, and Hezbollah), but history has already come to mock several of his arguments—none so much, perhaps, as his virtually hysterical championing of the second Gulf War, a crime that is most responsible for the current chaos in the Middle East. To his credit, he did not refrain from self-criticism or self-satire—as his Vanity Fair essays on physical self-improvement show...