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editor
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 Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 2:24 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Nativity Poems
Hardcover
By Joseph Brodsky
Translated by Various Artists
| Quote: | CHRISTMAS BALLAD
For Evgeny Rein, with love
There floats in an abiding gloom,
among immensities of brick,
a little boat of night: it seems
to sail through Alexander Park.
It's just a lonely streetlamp, though,
a yellow rose against the night,
for lovers strolling down below
the busy street.
There floats in an abiding gloom
a drone of bees: men drunk, asleep.
In the dark capital a lone
tourist takes another snap.
Now out onto Ordynka turns
a taxicab, with sickly faces;
dead men lean into the arms
of the low houses.
The floats in the abiding gloom
a poet in sorrow; over here
a round-faced man sells kerosene,
the sad custodian of his store.
Along a dull deserted street
an old Lothario hurries. Soon
the midnight-riding newlyweds
sail through the gloom.
There floats in outer Moscow one
who swims at random to his loss,
and Jewish accents wander down
a dismal yellow flight of stairs.
From love toward unhappiness,
to New Year's Eve, to Sunday, floats
a good-time girl: she can't express
what's lost inside.
Cold evening floats within your eyes
and snow is fluttering on the panes
of carriages; the wind is ice
and pale, it seals your reddened palms.
Evening lights like honey seep;
the scent of halvah's everywhere,
as Christmas Eve lifts up its sweet-
meats in the air.
Now drifting on a dark-blue wave
across the city's gloomy sea,
there floating by, your New Year's Eve --
as if life could restart, could be
a thing of light with each day lived
successfully, and food to eat,
-- as if, life having rolled to left,
it could roll right.
1962
Translated by Glyn Maxwell
(-- pgs. 5-6) |
| Quote: | ... ''Nativity Poems'' collects the poems Joseph Brodsky produced most winter seasons starting in 1962, when he was a ratty 22-year-old dissident haunting the St. Petersburg cafes until the K.G.B. hauled him off to a labor camp. The last was written in 1995, a few months before his death, after a quarter-century of flaming and desolate exile in the United States. Here he became poet laureate. Universities competed to hire him. The Nobel Prize duly arrived. His fellow Nobel poets loved him, translated him, drank with him, stayed up late with him and eulogized him when his heart failed; not broken, perhaps, but certainly overcompressed.
The first Christmases in this collection find Brodsky in his early mode of dark rebellion. It was a difficult condition in many ways, among them of course the labor camp years. Yet to a writer it offered a kind of bulwark. The Soviet Union was granite oppression and provided an unbudging gritty mass to strike a poetic match against.
''You get a sense of superiority rather easily,'' Brodsky recalled years later in the United States. ''You are working against such obvious notions of vulgarity; and the state is there in a kind of obvious grandeur. You identify yourself as the good, and you may be the worst possible.''
Several of the early poems here tend to reflect this odd mixture of pain and an arrogance that could almost be called satiric complacency. The poetry sometimes breaches it, as in ''Christmas Ballad'' (1962), whose mordant portrait of a joyless St. Petersburg winter lifts with images that fly above it. Of a streetlight: ''There floats in an abiding gloom/ among immensities of brick,/ a little boat of night.'' (From BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Christmas Verses Begin In Early, Dark Rebellion by Richard Eder in The New York Times Dec. 19/01) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:17 pm Post subject: |
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From - alas - Losing Streak:
Loving
Poetry and Art
Edited by Charles Sullivan
| Quote: | A PITY - WE WERE SUCH A GOOD INVENTION
Yehuda Amichai
TRANSLATED FROM hEBREW BY ASSIA GUTMANN
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.
A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little .
(--p. 15, proceeding a photo of The Fall of Man and The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Michalangelo. 1508-12. Fresco, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, The Vatican, Rome) |
| Quote: | TONIGHT I CAN WRITE THE SADDEST LINES
Pablo Neruda
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY W.S. MERWIN
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, "The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest liunes.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are lno longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
(-- pgs. 12-13) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:30 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Art & Love
An Illustrated Anthology
of Love Poetry
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods --
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house --, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, --
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian. 1875-1926
(-- p. 51, adjacent to Origin of the Greek Vase. Auguste
Rodin. French. 1840-1917. Watercolor, gouache, and pencil.) |
| Quote: | SONNET XLIII,
FROM THE PORTUGUESE
HOW do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, -I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English, 1806-1861
(-- p. 68, adjacent to The Music Lesson. Modeled by
Joseph Willems. English (Chelsea). Soft-paste porcelain,
1762-1765) |
| Quote: | SONNET XVIII
MORE of the bard at the PokerPulse
Gambler's Guide to Shakespeare.
Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
William Shakespeare, English, 1564-1616
(-- p. 73, adjacent to The Beach at Sainte-Adresse.
Claude Monet, French. 1840-1926. Oil on canvas, 1867. |
| Quote: | I WALKED PAST A HOUSE WHERE I LIVED ONCE
I walked past a house where I lived once:
a man and a woman are still together in the
whispers there.
Many years have passed with the quiet hum
of the staircase bulb going on
and off and on again.
The keyholes are like little wounds
where all the blood seeped out. And inside,
people pale as death.
I want to stand once again as I did
holding my first love all night long in the doorway.
When we left at dawn, the house
began to fall apart and since then the city and
since then
the whole world.
I want to be filled with longing again
till dark burn marks show on my skin.
I want to be written again
in the Book of Life, to be written every single day
till the writing hand hurts.
Yehuda Amichai, Israeli, bo. 1924
(-- p. 114, adjacent to Thursday. John Moore, American, b. 1941,
Oil on canvas, 1980.) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:33 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Time's River
The Voyage of Life in Art and Poetry
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Hardcover
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | Sonnet XXIX
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
William Shakespeare, English, 1564-1616
(-- p. 90, adjacent to Edouard Vuillard, Repast in a Garden, 1898) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:40 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
Art and Nature
An Illustrated Anthology of Nature Poetry
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Hardcover
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | SAILING HOMEWARD
Cliffs that rise a thousand feet
Without a break,
Lake that stretches a hundred miles
Without a wave,
Sands that are white through all the year
Wthout a stain,
Pine-tree woods, winter and summer,
Ever-green,
Streams that for ever flow and flow
Without a pause,
Trees that for twenty thousand years
Your vows have kept,
You have suddenly healed the pain of a traveller's heart,
And moved his brush to write a new song.
Chan Fan-Sheng, Chinese, 5th century
(-- p. 18, below Peach Blossom Spring. Fan Chi, Chinese. 1616 -after 1694. Leaf from the album Landscapes. 1646; ink and color on paper.) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:49 pm Post subject: |
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From Gambling for Gold:
Blue Iris
Poems and Essays
By Mary Oliver
Hardcover
| Quote: | Goldenrod
On roadsides,
in fall fields,
in rumpy bunches,
saffron and orange and pale gold,
in little towers,
soft as mash,
sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers,
full of bees and yellow beads and perfect flowerlets
and orange butterflies.
I don’t suppose
much notice comes of it, except for honey,
and how it heartens the heart with its
blank blaze.
I don’t suppose anything loves it except, perhaps,
the rocky voids
filled by its dumb dazzle.
For myself,
I was just passing by, when the wind flared
and the blossoms rustled,
and the glittering pandemonium
leaned on me.
I was just minding my own business
when I founc myself on their straw hillsides,
citron and butter-colored,
and was happy, and why not?
Are not the difficult labors of our lives
full of dark hours?
And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far,
that is better than these light-filled bodies?
All day
on the airy backbones
they toss in the wind,
they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
they rise in a stiff sweetness,
in the pure peace of giving
one’s gold away.
(-- pgs. 6-7) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:52 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
What Do We Know?
Poems and Prose Poems
Hardcover
By Mary Oliver
| Quote: | 6.
Don't tell us
how to love, don't tell us
how to grieve, or what
to grieve for, or how loss
shouldn't sit down like a gray
bundle of dust in the deepest
pockets of our energy, don't laugh at our belief
that money isn't
everything, don't tell us
how to behave in
anger, in longing, in loss, in home-
sickness, don't tell us,
dear friends.
7.
Goodbye, house.
Goodbye, sweet and beautiful house,
we shouted, and it shouted back,
goodbye to you, and lifted itself
down from the town, and set off
like a packet of clouds across
the harbor's blue ring,
the tossing bell, the sandy point - and turned
lightly, wordlessly,
into the keep of the wind
where it floats still -
where it plunges and rises still
on the black and dreamy sea.
(From On Losing a House, pgs. 30-32) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:55 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Thirst
Poems by Mary Oliver
Hardcover
| Quote: | Thirst
Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the
hour and the bell; grant me, in your
mercy, a little more time. Love for the
earth and love for your are having such a
long conversation in my heart. Who
knows what will finally happen or
where I will be sent, yet already I have
given a great many things away, expect-
ing to be told to pack nothing, except the
prayers which, with this thirst, I am
slowly learning.
(-- p. 69)
*After Her Death
I am trying to find the lesson
for tomorrow. Matthew something.
Which lectionary? I have not
forgotten the Way, but, a little,
the way to the Way. The trees keep whispering
peace, peace, and the birds
in the shallows are full of the
bodies of small fish and are
content. They open their wings
so easily, and fly. So. It is still
possible.
I open the book
which the strange, difficult, beatutiful church
has given me. To Matthew. Anywhere.
(-- p. 16) |
| Quote: | The Boston Globe
*Molly Cook; Cape gallery owner offered unique lens on life
By Tom Long
Aug. 30/05
Artsy, eccentric, and smart, Molly Malone Cook was a colorful fixture on the Provincetown scene for 50 years. ''She was both formidable and lovable, if that makes sense. She didn't suffer fools, but at the same time, she was very warm-hearted," her friend filmmaker John Waters said yesterday. ''She represented everything that is great about Provincetown."
Ms. Cook -- photographer, gallery owner, and muse -- died of complications of lung cancer Friday (Aug. 26/05) in the Provincetown home she shared with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver. She was 80. |
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 2:13 pm Post subject: |
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From Gambler's Nosh:
The Door
Poems
Hardcover
By * Margaret Atwood
| Quote: | where do we both get off?
Is this small talent we have prized
so much, and rubbed like silver
spoons, until it shone
at least as brightly as neon, really
so much better than the ability
to win the sausage-eating contest,
or juggle six plates at once?
What's the use anyway
of calling the dead back, moving stones,
or making animals cry? I
think of you, loping along at night
to the convenience store, to buy your pint
of milk, your six medium eggs,
your head stuffed full of consonants
like lovely pebbles
you picked up on some lustrous beach
you can't remember - my feather-
headed fool, what have you got
in your almost-empty pockets
that would lure even the lowliest mugger?
Who needs your handful
of glimmering air, your foxfire, you few
underwater cyrstal tricks
that work only in moonlight?
Noon hits them and they fall apart,
old bones and earth, old teeth, a bundleful
of shadow. Sometimes, I know, the almost-holy
whiteness rooted in our skulls spreads out
like thistles in a vacant lot, a hot powdery
flare-up, which is not a halo
and will return at intervals
if we're grateful or else lucky, and
will end by fusing our neurons ...
(From Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later, pgs. 30-31) |
| Quote: | | *Note: ... and despite countless well-deserved awards, who nevertheless made time on a holiday in the Loire Valley to send a quick note to a desperate housewife fan alone and palely loitering in a foggy California bedroom community - a note we include with pride and gratitude among our own collection of 'glimmering air and foxfire.' |
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| Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2008 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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From The Will to Win:
Good Poems
Hardcover
Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
| Quote: | Dog's Death
John Updike
She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.
Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.
(From Part 10, Beasts, p. 247) |
| Quote: | 3 doz. poems
Audio CD
Selected and narrated beautifully by Keillor
Years of radio have perfected the clarion Keillor delivery! A joy! |
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| Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:17 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Critics
Her Own Society
A new reading of Emily Dickinson
By Judith Thurman
Aug. 4/08
| Quote: | Dickinson came to Higginson in the guise of an unpublished novice, though by this point—middle age (she died at fifty-five)—she had composed hundreds of poems. Among them are some of the greatest ever written in English, but an English unique to her—an unworn language. It revives sensation at the extremities of feeling that, in most lives, habit and cliché have numbed. Few voices are more solitary than her first person, yet few are more intimate: she writes I to I. Richard B. Sewall, whose critical biography, “The Life of Emily Dickinson” (1974), is still unsurpassed, classed her with George Herbert, Wordsworth, the author of the Psalms and of Job, and, in her eerie genius for metaphor (a comparison that isn’t impertinent), Shakespeare.
It is hard to believe that Dickinson didn’t know who and what she was, even if no one else did. She kept her poems in a bureau drawer, sewn into bundles. But she had shared a few with her closest friends, among them her sister-in-law and Samuel Bowles—a driven man, famously attractive, like her new pen pal, and the editor of an influential newspaper, the Springfield Republican. Bowles had already printed three lyrics anonymously. She enclosed one of them in her note to Higginson (who then lived in Worcester) with three others:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning—
And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the
Resurrection—
Rafter of Satin—and Roof of Stone—
Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
And Firmaments—row—
Diadems—drop—
And Doges—surrender—
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disc of Snow.
...
In the course of their friendship, Higginson tried to lead this “wayward” sport of nature, whose rhymes were off, whose rhythm he called “spasmodic,” whose lines were strung tensely between dashes, and who claimed the modern privilege of refusing to signify what others expected her to mean in “the direction of rules and traditions.” (Her credo was “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”) After Dickinson’s death, in 1886, Lavinia asked Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin’s beautiful and ambitious mistress, to edit the poems, and Higginson to help her, lending the project his prestige. (Only ten brief lyrics had appeared in her lifetime, grudgingly surrendered, and without a signature. One was attributed to Emerson.) Todd sometimes went further than Higginson would have liked in taking liberties with Dickinson’s syntax, punctuation, and even her choice of words. He approved and took part in the cleanup, however. Their anthology was published in 1890, and reviews were mixed (some ecstatic, more disdainful), but almost immediately Dickinson acquired a cult following, mostly among women. They showed up in Amherst, asking directions to the Homestead, the Dickinsons’ Federal manor on Main Street, which has since become a museum. The collection quickly went through eleven editions and was followed by seven others, a memoir by Mabel Todd’s daughter, four volumes of letters, endless speculation about the poet’s secrets, and the rise of a myth. By the nineteen-fifties, Dickinson was part of the canon (almost no one graduates from high school without having read her). Her complete works—nearly eighteen hundred poems, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, and letters, edited by Johnson and Theodora Ward, three volumes of each—were enshrined in annotated editions that restored their formal integrity, revealing the magnitude of her power but also the depths of her strangeness. (-- pgs. 68-72 |
| Quote: | | Note to ESL students: There's a good number of sound recordings of dear Emily's work - poems and letters - but we've not heard even one. We'll do our best to find a few. Please check back soon for updates. In the meantime, Ms. Thurman's article - actually a book review - is a wonderful introduction to the poet and her work. |
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| Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 2:17 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Fighting and Writing
The loved and the unlovable in "Cyrano de Bergerac"
By John Lahr
Nov. 12/07
| Quote: | The word “panache” was adopted into English only after the phenomenal success of the French playwright Edmond Rostand’s 1897 “heroic comedy” “Cyrano de Bergerac,” whose flamboyant, big-nosed hero took revenge on his ugliness by making a legend of his physical and intellectual prowess. “I’m going to take the simplest approach to life of all. . . . I’ve decided to excel in everything,” Cyrano announces in the current superb revival of the play (at the Richard Rodgers, under the deft direction of David Leveaux). “Panache” means, literally, the tuft of feathers on Cyrano’s cap; figuratively, it refers to his sumptuous impertinence. The word is both Cyrano’s dying breath and the play’s last word—an epitaph, as well as an envoi, to his dandyism. ...
Just as a dandy wants it both ways—to rebel against society and to be accepted by it on his own terms—so does Rostand. In the last act, he jumps fifteen years ahead, to a monastery where Roxane has rusticated herself after Christian’s death and where Cyrano visits her every week, living out the old romantic formula of suffering without reward. Until Roxane susses that Cyrano is the author of Christian’s letters, he never confesses his love; like the autumn leaves that contrive to “go in grace” as they fall, he also hides, at first, his mortal wound. For Roxane, he musters a rueful little joke. “I’ve missed everything—even my death,” he says. But his loss is greater than that. By missing out on love, he has also missed out on life, or almost. “I never had much acquaintance with the sweetness of woman,” he tells Roxane, finally speaking his heart. “But—and, God bless you for this, for ever and ever I have had one friend different from the few others.” “I never loved but one man in my life,” Roxane tells him. “Now I must lose him twice.” Even in his dying, Cyrano, ever the dandy, dares with tact. “And make those tears which have been wholly his, / Mine too, just a little, mine,” he says. That sad, modest wish—to be kept in mind—strikes a resounding note of grief and gratitude that echoes down the ages. (-- pgs. 96-97) |
Cyrano
DVD
French with yellow sub-titles that sometimes work
... the role that made British actor Sir Derek Jacobi a Broadway heartthrob:
Cyrano de Bergerac
Translated by Anthony Burgess
Directed by Terry Hands
VHS only
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 9:55 am Post subject: |
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From Gambling on God:
Good Poems
Selected by Garrison Keillor
Hardcover
| Quote: | Cathedral Builders
John Ormond
They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
With winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
Inhabited sky with hammers, defied gravity,
Deified stone, took up God's house to meet Him,
And came down to their suppers and small beer,
Every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
Quarrelled and cuffed the children, lied,
Spat, sang, were happy or unhbappy,
And every day took to the ladders again,
Impeded the rights of way of another summer's
Swallows, grew greyer, shakier, became less inclined
To fix a neighbour's roof of a fine evening,
Saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
Cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
Somehow escaped the plague, got rheumatism,
Decided it was time to give it up,
To leave the spire to others, stood in the crowd
Well back from the vestments at the consecration,
Envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
Cocked up a squint eye and said, "I bloody did that."
(-- p. 356) |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:34 am Post subject: |
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From the Ultimate High-Stakes Gamble:
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
Edited and Newly Translated by Chana Bloch
and Stephen Mitchell
Hardcover
| Quote: | The Body Is the Reason for Love
The body is the reason for love;
after that, the fortress that protects it;
after that, love's prison.
But when the body dies, love is set free
in wild abundance,
like a slot machine that breaks down
and with a furious ringing pours out all at once
all the coins of
all the generations of luck.
(-- p. 153) |
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Last edited by editor on Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:53 pm Post subject: |
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From the Ultimate High-Stakes Gamble:
Travels
A bilingual edition
Hardcover
By Yehuda Amichai
Translated from the Hebrew by Ruth Nevo
| Quote: | A story and a child, love and again, world and ear,
time in a curled smile, loving and opening:
the house to the night, the earth to the dead and the rain
after the gift of sun. Spring sprouted green words
in us, and the summer gambled on our arriving first,
and love burst out of us, all at once,
all over, like sweat, in the fear,
in the race of our lives, the game.
And children grew and ripened, for the water level
rises all the time with the terrible flood, and all their growth
is because of the rising flood, so as not to drown.
And still, his finger-tips dusted with moon,
like a schoolmaster's with chalk,
God strokes our head, his wrists already
song and angels! And what elbows! And what a face -
of a woman already turned to other matters. A profile
in a window.
(-- p. 25) |
| Quote: | Both of Us Together, Each of Us A Part
RARE! Audio Cassette
A public reading by the author, Yehuda Amichai, Nov. 20/80 at the Kennedy Center for the Perfoming Arts in Washington, D.C.
From a rare and charming live recording at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., Nov. 20/80. Producer Anne Becker, Recording Engineer Bill Clemens, Post Prod. Engineers Alan Austin and Anne Becker. Forward-thinking librarians may have purchased a copy or two of this rare bilingual recording, which allows listeners to hear some of the author's finest poems in both the original Hebrew and English - always a treat! |
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