Click here to listen to an audio interview with Paul Mariani
This provocative collection of new poems is the latest in a series of Paul Mariani's rich contributions to American literature. These spiritually searching poems develop themes of personal loss - the deaths we experience - as well as the quest for new life often known as tranfigurations.
Barry Moser, one of the world's foremost book designers and illustrators, has created a series of original engravings within the text that correspond to the major themes in Mariani's verse.
Listen to Paul Mariani Read from Deaths and Transfigurations:
". . .this luminous collection is finally about what it means to live." Booklist August 1, 2005
"Deaths & Transfigurations. . .is rich with references to literature---particularly to Dante and Gerard Manley Hopkins---and to Scripture. It seems as Mariani ages, his obsession with his past continues to grow. . .Mariani is able to dazzle with his beautiful craftsmanship." Books & Culture August 1, 2005 <hr>
Mariani's first new collection in nine years takes as its major themes death in all its forms and the quest for new life. If the images here are simple, the emotions are not. "Wasn't It Us You Were Seeking?" addresses the refusal to mourn a mother 10 years dead, while "Solar Ice" describes the rituals of the Catholic Mass. Others are about memories of fleeting childhoods over sooner than one would have thought, of Saturday night first dates, of fathers worrying about keeping food on the table, of the unexpected suddenness of death sweeping down on a clear September day in 2001, and of patients who never appeared at hospital doors. Recalled, too, are early university teaching days, when, discussing death and dying in Hemingway, Mariani learned of President Kennedy's assassination. But renewal is celebrated, too, in the coming of spring to New England, the way light strikes a pitcher, a wedding, and the cycles of life, so that this luminous collection is finally about what it means to live. June Sawyers Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved
The oldest of seven children from a working-class background, Paul Mariani was born in New York City in 1940 and grew up there and on Long Island. He earned his bachelor's degree from Manhattan College, a Master's from Colgate University, and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. He is the author of six poetry collections: Deaths & Transfigurations (Paraclete Press, 2005), The Great Wheel (W. W. Norton, 1996), Salvage Operations: New & Selected Poems (1990), Prime Mover (1985), Crossing Cocytus (1982), and Timing Devices (1979).
He has published numerous books of prose, including Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (Viking, 2002), and God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable (University of Georgia Press, 2002). Other books include A Usable Past: Essays, 1973-1983 (1984), William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics (1975), and A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1970), as well as five biographies: Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (Viking, 2008) The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (W. W. Norton, 1999); Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (1994), all named New York Times Notable Books of the year; Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (1990); and William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981), which won the New Jersey Writers Award, was short-listed for an American Book Award, and was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the year.
His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also been shortlisted for the Tait Award for biography. He was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught from 1968 until 2000, when he was named University Professor of English at Boston College. In 2009 he received the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Mariani and his wife, Eileen, have three grown sons and live in western Massachusetts. He is currently working on a memoir of growing up on the mean streets of Manhattan in the 1940s.
