Nonfiction

– But what do you want? – A life. – A life? *     *      * It's possible to love solitude when you're surrounded by a life-with-others. When there is no life-with-others, ultimate things lose their relative meaning. *     *      * In folk tales, what we've come to consider the human world, the real real world, is the…

I When Intelligence approaches its goal only to pull back at the prompting of instinct, we stand alerted to something whose charged importance demands that we approach it again. My point of departure comes not from David Jones but rather from an essay of 1979 by Robert Hass on Tomas Transtromer. Several of his sentences…

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. . . . We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they…

The interview with Michael S. Harper took place in Harper's condominium, a reconstructed factory building in downtown Providence. There was a huge decorated Christmas tree, a good feeling of space in the giant, somewhat loosely partitioned main room, and Michael's wife, Shirley, and their three children, Roland, Patrice and Rachel were about. During the interview,…

in January 1980 MH: When I first heard that you were putting together a long poem called "An Explanation of America," it crossed my mind that this must be a rather arrogant enterprise. But with that title, and the poem's length, and the titles of the three main sections ("Its Many Fragments," "Its Great Emptiness,"…

Benedict Kiely, a writer in whom are joined magnificent lyrical and comic gifts, is one of the most admired of literary figures in his native Ireland. Although a number of his novels have been published here and his short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, he has not had the kind of…

A memorial tribute read at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, 7 December 1979 My wife and I first met Elizabeth Bishop at the Eberharts' apartment in Cambridge, more than thirty years ago. She had just recently published her first book, North & South, which the reviewers had admired but which had also had…

Derek Mahon, Poems 1962-1978, O.U.P., London, 1979; £5.75. In `Tradition and the Individual Talent,' T. S. Eliot warns against the tendency to single out and praise those aspects of a writer's work `in which he least resembles anyone else', adding that `the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead…

I Everybody knows what the year 1966 meant to Irish people. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the military adventure which gave modern Irish society its present shape. But it was also a year of some importance in the history of modern Irish fiction, for during it, on March 10, Frank O'Connor died. It may…