UNITED STATES AUTHOR · CORRESPONDENCE · POETS
Hart Crane
ALONE AND JUST SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD,Harold Hart Crane moved to New York City from Cleveland, Ohio, in late December 1916.
— from O my land, my friends, 1997
Most acclaimed
The Bridge
The Bridge is a charming, learned and unique gem of a book by the author of the international bestseller In Europe...Istanbul's Galata Bridge has spanned the Golden Horn since the sixth century AD, connecting the old city with the more Western districts to the north. But the bridge is a city in itself, peopled by merchants and petty thieves, tourists and fishermen, and at the same time a microcosmic reflection of Turkey as the link between Asia and Europe. Geert Mak introduces us to the woman who sells lottery tickets, the cigarette vendors and the best pickpockets in Europe. He tells us about the pride of the cobbler and the tea-seller's homesickness. And he describes the role of honour in Turkish culture, the temptations of fundamentalism and violence, and the urge to survive, even in the face of despair. These stories of the bridge's denizens are interwoven with vignettes illuminating moments in the history of Istanbul and Turkey and shedding light on Turkey's relationship with Europe and the West, the Armenian question, the migration from the Turkish countryside to the city and the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The Bridge is a charming, learned and unique gem of a book by the author of the international bestseller In Europe.
O my land, my friends
1997
O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane collects the most significant letters from one of America's most evocative modern poets into a document as passionate, revealing, and ultimately as tragic as Crane's short life. He died at the age of thirty-two. Of the 1200 letters that survive, this edition selects over three hundred that best illustrate the complexity and textures of Crane's life - from family pressures to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality. These letters served as his notebook, his diary, his workshop, and confessional. Preserving ideas, observations, speculations and even drafts of poems, Crane's letters richly document his intelligence and imagination, as well as his alcoholism and self-destruction, more intimately than any biography. And whatever the myth of Crane's indulgences may hold, these letters show that Crane was dedicated as an artist striving to create uniquely American poetry.
Complete poems
This volume of E.J. Pratt's selected poems introduces Pratt's poems to the college and university student, providing the background necessary for an informed reading of the poems. The volume offers a full sampling of Pratt's poems chosen both for their representativeness and for their intrinsic value. Included are the major long poems, The Witches' Brew, The Iron Door, The Titanic, Brébeuf and His Brethren, and Towards the Last Spike, and important shorter lyrics such as 'Newfoundland,' 'Come Away, Death,' and 'From Stone to Steel.' The editorial approach is historical, chronological, and biographical. The introduction locates E.J. Pratt in his Newfoundland and Canadian contexts, and discusses the development of his work in relation to his early modernist contemporaries, concluding that Pratt remains the most important and influential Canadian poet up to the mid-fifties. As such, he has been a key figure in shaping the Canadian literary imagination of his day and the later poetics of landscape adopted by Earle Birney and Margaret Atwood. The editors provide annotations, textual notes, and a biographical chronology. The printed volume is supplemented by the electronic resources of the Selected Pratt website at www.trentu.ca/pratt/selected.