Böcker av Michael Schmidt

The March-April 2024 issue. Since we started as Poetry Nation, a twice yearly hardback, in 1973, we've been publishing new poetry, rediscoveries, commentary, literary essays, interviews and reviews from around the globe. This issue includes a major statement by Russian poet Maria Stepanova on the repair work poetry must do in the contemporary political world; Rod Mengham on the surviving essence of East Germany; Jena Schmidt on Friederike Mayrö cker's great poems; Andrew McNeillie revisits Dylan Thomas; and Patrick McGuinness on Colm Tó ibí n's poems. Our vast archive now includes over 270 issues, with contributions from some of the most important writers of our times. Key contributors include Octavio Paz, Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Patricia Beer, W.S. Graham, Eavan Boland, Jorie Graham, Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Sinead Morrissey, Sasha Dugdale, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and many others.

Reproduced within this book are the essential poems of Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, John Betjeman, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and many other major poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For each, Michael Schmidt has provided an insight into their themes and the background to their work, opening for the reader a greater understanding and enjoyment of these extraordinary poems.

Karl Leonhard Reinhold publizierte Ende der 1780er-Jahre eine Reihe von Schriften, mit denen er beanspruchte, Immanuel Kants geschmackstheoretische Ausführungen der Kritik der Urteilskraft zu antizipieren. Ziel dieser Studie ist eine bis dato nicht vorgenommene umfassende kontextualisierende Analyse dieser frühen ästhetischen Ansätze, die u. a. auf das Schöne und die Kunst appliziert werden. Reinhold diskutiert die seiner Ansicht nach einseitigen Lustkonzeptionen von Dubos, Pouilly, Wolff, Mendelssohn, Sulzer und Helvétius, welche er mit seiner eigenen Theorie des Vergnügens ergänzt. Die Empfindungstheorie Ernst Platners wird als ein holistischer Zugang gewürdigt. Reinholds Ausführungen nehmen Kants Geschmackskritik zwar nicht vorweg, doch sind sie mit dieser vereinbar und können als ihr vergnügens- und triebtheoretisches Fundament angesehen werden. Platners Einfluss ist dabei nur einer von vielen und verblasst neben dem von Kants Epistemologie und Ethik. Die Originalität von Reinholds Reflexionen liegt v. a. in einer transzendentalphilosophischen Aufwertung der Sinnlichkeit in ästhetischen Belangen und einem Vorläufermodell des freien Spiels der Erkenntniskräfte als einer starken und leichten Beschäftigung der Vorstellungskraft.

Tommy Turtle is a shy land turtle who likes to hide inside his shell. Tommy represents children who are shy around other children and adults, and he is nervous to play or speak. Most children are shy from time to time and it's important for children to understand shyness and how to act around others who are or aren't shy. Children need to know that shyness is normal, and they need positive encouragement from peers, family, and teachers/adults in their lives. This concept teaching can start in preschool. Children need to develop and practice social skills which will increase their quality of life in school through drama class, music, gym class, show and tell time, play time and more, rather than staying on the sidelines and simply watching others and having less friends and social isolation. If confidence is learned, self-esteem increases, and children succeed. Less confidence promotes increased shyness. It is essential to praise children for their successes and not shame them at all when they fail. All social and emotional learning helps children to express feelings and be tuned in to the needs of others. This teaching contributes to the development of all children. Social acceptance and inclusion are important in social learning from an early age. The opportunity to interact with your child/children in a positive environment, such as the park in this story, illustrates the importance of a positive environment in aiding children with learning social skills with other children and adults. Tommy Turtle helps parents and teachers reinforce positive behaviors in an imaginative setting of a park and mud puddles as they learn about land turtles and shyness. Learning and sharing are essential for social development in all children.

In Unicorn Dreams, children learn how to pretend play. It's important for children to learn the concept of, and how to pretend play (make-believe or imaginative play), as this fosters a child's creativity and sparks discussions with your child, which in turn helps your child's thinking skills when working out a new situation during play. Imaginative play contributes to the development of all children. Oftentimes, children may pretend to cook with toy dishes, or engage in tea parties with a friend, and some might pretend play when alone with a parent at home. A parent can provide a safe environment for a child to act out things that they cannot do in real life, such as having two dolls get married. The opportunity to interact with your child/children in this positive environment helps children with language and learning social skills with other children and adults. Pretend play also allows for play in which not all children will receive what they want (not all can be a king or queen), and parents help their child learn positive behaviors. Unicorn Dreams teaches children to pretend play and gives children positive thoughts before naptime or bedtime.

A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt, The First Poets brings to life the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination. Starting with the legendary Orpheus and the possibly mythical Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, 'the dirty old man of poetry', to Theocritus, the father of pastoral; from Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff for love, to Hesiod, who claimed a visit from the Muses - the stories in The First Poets masterfully merge fact and conjecture into animated and compelling portraits of our cultural ancestors. 'Every poet should buy a copy of this book to keep on their bookshelves. And, when the occasion arises, they should throw it at the cynic who may try to ignore or demean them' Independent.

Acclaimed literary historian Schmidt provides a unique meditation on the rediscovery of Gilgamesh and its profound influence on poets today. He describes how the poem is a work in progress even now, an undertaking that has drawn on the talents and obsessions of an unlikely cast of characters, from archaeologists and museum curators to tomb raiders and jihadis.

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Encompassing a range of genres, it is geographically and culturally boundless and influenced by great novelists working in other languages. Michael Schmidt, choosing as his travel companions not critics or theorists but other novelists, does full justice to its complexity.

Offers a fascinating exploration of the dark corners of South Africa's past. Michael Schmidt's revelations move from South Africa's nuclear programme under apartheid to the problems of today's deeply unequal society, tracing the threads of secrecy, privilege and the violence that is needed to maintain it.

What links their diverse voices is a common language: each poem, in its own way, adds to the resources of the medium and makes it new. The poems in this book are allowed to slip free of their moorings in the biography and history of the last century to create new spaces and times.