David Constantine

"David Constantine's three lectures have to do with the chief end and means of poetry: a lively and effective language. In the first, Translation Is Good For You, drawing mainly on the life, letters and poems of Keats, he considers translation as a way to a poetic identity and a language of one's own." "In the second, Use and Ornament, Constantine looks at the particular case of a poet, Brecht, who wanted his writing to be useful but who understood better than most what the peculiar resources and responsibilities of the lyric poem are. Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas are also considered in this context." "The third lecture, Poetry of the Present, largely concerned with Walt Whitman and D.H. Lawrence, discusses the ambition of free verse to convey the abundance and quickness of life in the truest (liveliest) way. The sonnets and other fixed forms used by Rilke are offered as an alternative. In all three lectures there is a continual effort to define the good effects a poem may have when, by whatever means, it achieves its ends."--BOOK JACKET.

192 p. ; 22 cm

Discussions on the subject of the Roman festival of Saturnalia, near the time of the winter solstice. By Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, a fifth-century Roman grammarian and Neoplatonist philosopher, possibly born in Syria or N. Africa. Includes discussions of the Roman calendar and sun worship.

In this modern version of the Grand Tour, Theroux sets off from Gibraltar, one of the fabled Pillars of Hercules, on a glorious journey around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a long, lively, occasionally dangerous, and endlessly fascinating trip, up the coast of Spain, along the Riviera, by ferry to the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and beyond - way beyond. By foot, train, bus, and cruise ship, Theroux travels around Italy and the Greek islands, to Albania in a state of near anarchy and to war-torn Croatia. He sails across an old sea of myths into Istanbul, its minarets, mosque domes, and obelisks beckoning him to the Levant. After hearing of Theroux's onward itinerary, a Turkish shipmate murmurs, "Gechmis olsen!" - May it be behind you! Ahead are Damascus and the remote villages of Syria, shrouded in the cult of Assad and his martyred son; Israel, besieged by suicide bombers; Egypt, where Theroux visits with Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, recovering from an assassination attempt. And past the hill that marks the southern Pillar of Hercules lie Morocco and Paul Bowles' Tangier. . Exploring coastlines as wild as anything he encountered in China or Peru, probing through layers of tradition and culture, ancient and modern, tawdry and splendid, Theroux recalls the words of his predecessors - Homer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Carlo Levi, Lawrence Durrell - and weaves the legends and siren calls of civilizations as old as time into a tantalizing story about life on the Mediterranean today.