Mary Gilliland's Picks!
The painter Guido Diamante is plunged into the mystery surrounding the apparent suicide of his rascal mentor at the Hudson River College. Exciting, heady times ensue as he reviews his own guilty past and traces his life through a labyrinth of adventures from the sexy, psychedelic 1960s to the financial crisis of 2008. Steeped in references to Renaissance art, alchemy, and the Tarot, Carnevale is a family saga, a satire of the art market and of faculty life, and the story of Guido's love for his wayward cousin Tina, a psychic like him.
Throughout her nearly sixty-year career, acclaimed poet Eavan Boland came to be known for her exquisite ability to weave myth, history, and the life of an ordinary woman into mesmerizing poetry. She was an essential voice in both feminist and Irish literature, praised for her "edgy precision, an uncanny sympathy and warmth, an unsettling sense of history" (J. D. McClatchy). Her final volume, The Historians, is the culmination of her signature themes, exploring the ways in which the hidden, sometimes all-but-erased stories of women's lives can powerfully revise our sense of the past.
Two women burning letters in a back garden. A poet who died too young. A mother's parable to her daughter. Boland listens to women who have long had no agency in the way their stories were told; in the title poem, she writes: "Say the word history: I see / your mother, mine. / ... / Their hands are full of words." Addressing Irish suffragettes in the final poem, Boland promises: "We will not leave you behind," a promise that animates each poem in this radiant collection. These extraordinary, intimate narratives cling to the future through memory, anger, and love in ways that rebuke the official record we call history.
Spanning thirty years of dazzling work--from luminous early love lyrics to often-anthologized Asian American identity anthems, from political and subversive hybrid forms to feminist manifestos--A Portrait of the Self as Nation is a selection from one of America's most original and vital voices. Marilyn Chin's passionate, polyphonic poetry is deeply engaged with the complexities of cultural assimilation, feminism, and the Asian American experience; she spins precise, beautiful metaphors as she illuminates hard-hitting truths.
The mansion is called Illyria, but for the writers and artists who flock there each summer, it's a Garden of Eden where every artistic curiosity is explored. Away from family, friends, and ordinary responsibilities, the creative spirit can flower, nurtured by the company of other artistic souls. Janet Belle Smith's husband doesn't understand why she can't write at home--or really, for that matter, why she must write at all--but for Janet, the reason is clear: Only in Illyria can she be herself.
But as the writer mingles with her fellow artists--including a Marxist novelist, a Beat poet, and a wild-man sculptor--she begins to fear that the "real" her isn't who she expected, and Illyria is not the peaceful kingdom it appears to be. This creative paradise is rotting from the inside out, and if Janet doesn't move quickly, she'll be trapped in the rubble when the walls come tumbling down.
From the National Book Award-shortlisted author of Foreign Affairs, this humorous story "goes down pleasantly, like a glass of lemonade" (The New York Times).
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alison Lurie including rare images from the author's collection.
Science, according to the received wisdom of the day, can answer any question we choose to put to it - even the most fundamental about ourselves, our behaviour and our cultures. But for Mary Midgley it can never be the whole story, as it cannot truly explain what it means to be human.
In this typically crusading work, universally acclaimed as a classic on first publication, she powerfully asserts her corrective view that without poetry (or literature, or music, or history, or even theology) we cannot hope to understand our humanity. In this remarkable book, the reader is struck by both the simplicity and power of her argument and the sheer pleasure of reading one of our most accessible philosophers.
Poetry. Beginning with the forest wanderings of a mentally lost father in the twentieth century, and ending with Eve's original choice of wisdom over obedience, THE RUINED WALLED CASTLE GARDEN's lyrics are spoken by or about actual historical figures such as Lizzie Borden, Emma Mille, Nikola Tesla, Virginia Woolf, and by unidentified representative contemporaries who work in a factory or model for an art class, visit Doha or Baghdad, weed a Scottish garden, walk beneath a New York winter sky. The poems interrogate faith, justice, militarism, madness, and the endless relation between two sexes.
By turns mystical and realist, Mary Gilliland's intensely musical poems consider global apocalypse-'our course set for the destitute sunset'-but also celebrate the generative power of creativity. With preternatural empathy, she enters fascinating sensibilities-Virginia Woolf, Nikola Tesla-and sings 'the troubled music' of history. Gilliland's sinewy, nuanced poems understand earth-and consciousness-as gardens that no walls or enchantments can protect. Her vision is profound, enduring.-Alice Fulton
Mary Gilliland's THE RUINED WALLED CASTLE GARDEN casts a sidelong glance at the human comedy in various times and places. Here a 'stubbled saint' stumbles into our contemporary world; the rush of life stops with a milennial 'where-were-you party.' Marked by compression, surprise, originality of language, a confident and eloquent voice cuts to the essential.-Mary Crow
Like the apothecarist Keats, Mary Gilliland's poetry wells up from the healing force of unheard melodies. Her tensile lyric and fluent narrative grasp the sweet otherness in life, which is 'Eve's radical helplessness' to endure and bear intimate witness to both change and permanence. THE RUINED WALLED CASTLE GARDEN is a radiant testimony-and a triumph-of an unerring ear I deeply cherish.-Ishion Hutchinson
