Böcker av Samuel Hazo

Samuel Hazo is known to the world of letters for his poetry and his fiction, but he's also an incisive and observant essayist. In this collection we meet Hazo the critic, Hazo the observer, Hazo the traveler, Hazo the moralist, and above all Hazo the human being.

Love is not bound by the rules of time. When Halleluiah Quinn met Tonio Vargas, they knew this was forever. But when her doctor gives her a fifty-fifty chance of survival, Halleluiah has to learn just how much forever she can pack into right now. Master poet, thoughtful essayist, captain in the Marine Corps, professor, and riveting novelist, Samuel Hazo was the first Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In this new novel, he tells a simple and moving love story with the wisdom of a philosopher and the urgency of a text message.

Thank a Bored Angel: Selected Poems by Samuel Hazo brings together the poetry of twenty-two years, drawn from eight previous volumes. Assembled here are selections from Discovery (1959), The Quiet Wars (1962), Listen with the Eye (1964), My Sons in God (1965), Blood Rights (1968), Once for the Last Bandit (1972), Quartered (1974), and To Paris (New Directions, 1981). In his preface, Hazo affirms that "each of these poems touches on themes that are still alive in me--alive in that they seem inexhaustible"; all are rendered in the poet's own voice, not "in what is irritatingly called a 'persona,'" and none, he says, either when originally composed or now, could be expressed differently. Casting back to the adventures and attachments of half a century, Thank a Bored Angel presents varied, colorful portraits from the poet's life--as father, son, brother, husband, traveler, army lieutenant, university professor, writer. It is emotion, fancy, speculation--the reflections cast in his mind by events and "accidents of place"--that give them weight. Likewise, Hazo's considerable passion and stylistic range are not flaunted but, measured by conscience and intent, constitute the poems' inimitable, penetrating lyricism.

A new collection of poems by Samuel Hazo; the majority of which are published here for the first time.

A collection of ten occasional essays on a variety of subjects, from the relationship between poetry and public speech, to the pursuit of the literary life, to reading within a cultural context governed by power relations.

Reading To Paris, Samuel Hazo's newest book of poems, is an act of exploration, a search for an American-ness that can be felt in one's self only while abroad. And what is discovered is not the alienation born of internal exile but a widening sense of humanity defined by tensions between time and place: now and then, here and now. "The Paris in this book," Hazo explains, "is not merely a matter of geography, it is also what Paris means in history and, above all, what it can be imagined to mean. Call it the Paris of the mind or even the Paris in the blood-a certain freedom for the arts, for poetry, for life itself regardless of contradiction or even of consequence. In this sense To Paris for me is both a directional signal and a toast." Here then are honest and courageous poems whose straightforward cadences are attuned to the familiar modulations of American speech. Hazo's voice, in the words of Archibald MacLeish, "has found the ease to speak the 'You' who is both 'He' and 'I'"--reminding us of what we always knew about ourselves but had forgotten to remember.