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…
Seamus Heaney has been at Harvard University teaching two writing courses during the Spring semester. The interview took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Michael Mazur's studio with James Randall and Seamus Heaney seated on a couch, tape recorder between them, and Michael Mazur working on sketches of Heaney for a monotype to be used for…
For more than twenty years now, Gina Berriault has been writing remarkably sensitive and powerful fiction. Her style is lucid, lyrical and very much her own, and she seems to have any number of strategies for breaking your heart. The first Gina Berriault story I ever read, long ago, let me know at once that…
1917-1977 O to break loose, like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall – raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten steps of the roaring ladder, and then to clear the top on the last try, alive enough to spawn and die. Stop, back off. The salmon…
Consciousness and Community in Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 Adrienne Rich has explored the relationship of personal and political consciousness in her poetry for the past 25 years. She has achieved a new synthesis of private and public experience in her most recent work, The Dream of a Common Language:…
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