Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.
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Sir Frank Kermode has been a prominent figure in the world of literary criticism since the 1960s. He has been King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge and Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He was knighted in 1991.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In "Harmonium",
This review is from: Harmonium (Faber Poetry) (Paperback)
Wallace Stevens first revealed his genius in 1923, when his first collection of poetry "Harmonium" was released. While it was only the first part of his career as a poet, Stevens' first book is in some ways his best -- despite being a little uneven, "Harmonium" has a rough, passionate quality.
"At night, by the fire,/The colors of the bushes/And of the fallen leaves,/Repeating themselves,/Turned in the room,/Like the leaves themselves/Turning in the wind," writes Stevens in "Domination of Black," a display of the beauty and eerieness of his work. And Stevens sticks to that in poems like "Infanta Marina" ("Her terrace was the sand/And the palms and the twilight"), the steamy beauty of "O Florida, Venereal Soil," or the eerie surreality of "Tattoo." While lush, rich poetry was what suited Stevens the best, "Harmonium" also has some more minimalist poetry, such as the sparse "Gubbinal" ("The world is ugly,/And the people are sad"). And one of his rare strikeouts is the confusing "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad." Even these are not bad, just not as good as they could be. Virtually anyone can write poetry -- the trick is writing something that stirs the reader, or at least makes them think. Stevens had a rare gift for poetry, and that gift propelled him into fame during his own lifetime. It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that he was one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Stevens dips into both free verse and rhyming poetry, without sticking solidly to anything for any period of time. At times his poetry is just an intellectual pleasure, without any rhyme or rhythm. But in "Le Monocle De Mon Oncle," he creates a poem with an almost hymnlike quality -- solemn, ornate and thoroughly beautiful. It's the descriptions that really make his poetry shine. He paints almost everything with color -- sapphire seas, gilt umbrellas, electric fireflies, rotted skulls, and how a "red bird flies across the golden floor." And with lines like "the light is like a spider./It crawls over the water," Stevens also gave his poetry a note of the dreamlike. Richly surreal and beautiful, "Harmonium" is a remarkably polished first collection. Wallace Stevens wasn't yet at his peak in the years before 1923, but with "Harmonium" he became a must-read.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The first volume of a major American poet,
By Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
This review is from: Harmonium (Hardcover)
This is one of those rare volumes, like the 'Lyrical Ballads' of Wordsworth and Coleridge which announces to the world the arrival of a new major Poet. Not all thought so at the time. And many found Stevens too dandified and precious to be a major voice. But among the poems of this collection are among the most beautifully colorful musical creations in Modern Poetry.
This volume contains the following Poems: Earthy Anecdote Invective Against Swans In the Carolinas The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage The Plot Against the Giant Infanta Marina Domination of Black The Snow Man The Ordinary Women The Load of Suger-Cane Le Monocle de Mon Oncle Nuances of a Theme by Williams Metaphors of a Magnifico Ploughing on Sunday Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores Fabliau of Florida The Doctor of Geneva Another Weeping Woman Homunculus et La Belle Etoile The Comedian as the Letter C From the Misery of Don Joost O Florida, Venereal Soil Last Look at the Lilacs The Worms at Heaven's Gate The Jack-Rabbit Anecdote of Men by the Thousand The Silver Plough Boy The Apostrophe to Vincentine Foral Decorations for Bananas Anecdote of Canna Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb Of the Surface of Things Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks A High-Toned Old Christian Woman The Place of the Solitaires The Weeping Burgher The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician Banal Sojourn Depression Before Spring The Emperor of Ice-Cream The Cuban Doctor Tea at he Palaz of Hoon Exposition of the Contents of a Cab Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock Sunday Morning The Virgin Carrying a Lantern Stars at Tallapoosa Explanation Six Significant Landscapes Bantams in Pine-Woods Anecdote of the Jar Palace of the Babies Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs. Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow Cortège for Rosenbloom Tattoo The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws Life is Motion Architecture The Wind Shifts Colloquy with a Polish Aunt Gubbinal Two Figures in Dense Violet Night Theory To the One of Fictive Music Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion Peter Quince at the Clavier Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Nomad Exquisite Tea To the Roaring Wind Poems Added to Harmonium (1931) The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad The Death of a Soldier Negation The Surprises of the Superhuman Sea Surface Full of Clouds The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade New England Verses Lunar Paraphrase Anatomy of Monotony The Public Square Sonatina to Hans Christian In the Clear Season of Grapes Two at Norfolk Indian River Among these are a number of the signature- poems of Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, The Emperor of Ice- Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, To the One of Fictive Music,Anecdote of the Jar, Bantams in Pine- Wood, The Snow Man, Sunday Morning. My own personal favorite is : Peter Quince at the Clavier . The poetry of its music is among the most deeply felt and colorful in all Stevens work. Its concluding Stanza rings in my mind at this moment. "Beauty is momentary in the mind- The fitful tracing of a portal But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; The body's beauty lives, So evenings die, in their green going,. A wave interminably flowing So gardens die their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter done repenting . So maidens die to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Off those white elders: but escaping Left only death's ironic scraping. Now in its immortality it plays upon the clear viol of her memory And makes a constant sacrament of praise." Stevens intense musicality, his love of color, the delicate intricacy of his long lines, his precise intellectual playing in searching for the Ideal in the Real, his seeming to make even Beauty a necessary fiction- all these and more- make him one of the most interesting and greatest of twentieth- century American poets.
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