Peter Nicholls

"Regard for George Oppen's poetry has been growing steadily over the last decade. Peter Nicholls's study offers a timely opportunity to engage with a body of work which can be both luminously simple and intriguingly opaque. Nicholls charts Oppen's commitment to Marxism and his later explorations of a 'poetics of being' inspired by Heidegger and Existentialism, providing detailed accounts of each of the poet's books. He is the first critic to draw extensively on the Oppen archive, with its thousands of pages of largely unpublished notes and drafts for poems; in doing so, he is able to map the distinctive contours of Oppen's poetic thinking and to investigate the complex origins of many of his poems. Oppen emerges from this study as a writer of mercurial intensities for whom every poem constitutes a 'beginning again', a freeing of the mind from thoughts known in advance. A strikingly innovative and challenging poetics results from Oppen's attempt to avoid what he regards as the errors of the modernist avant-garde and to create instead a designedly 'impoverished' aesthetic which keeps poetry close to the grain of experience and to the political and ethical dilemmas it constantly poses."--Jacket.

Presents some of the interesting true and false predictions of science fiction, including space travel, extraplanetary life, weaponry, telepathy, etc.

Fantastic Cinema, the book, chronicles the excitement from the beginnings of cinema to the present day: science fiction, fantasy, magic, the supernatural, the surreal, horror, monsters, animation, prehistoric pasts and brightly coloured futures. Fantastic Cinema reviews all the great fantasy movies from Metropolis to Return of the Jedi, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Poltergeist, from The Wizard of Oz to Superman III. This superbly illustrated study surveys the directors, the stars, the special effects and the imagery that have made this genre the most fascinating and vigorous form of contemporary world cinema. The years from 1968 to the present are, without doubt, the high point of fantastic cinema, with the best commercial talents of the day, such as Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Roeg and Carpenter, creating box-office and critical successes on a huge scale. In-depth analysis of key films from these years is supplemented by chapters on great directors, producers and special effects men. Over 350 films are discussed in the main text with a further 400 detailed in in a comprehensive filmography section which will be a delight to all cinema goers. Throughout, the book is heavily illustrated with stills in colour and black and white, graphically evoking the world of the fantastic in all its strangeness and excitement.