Böcker av Stephen Romer

Stephen Romer's essays range from the key figures of French and English Modernism to the contemporary practice of poetry, and its translation. At the heart of Chaos and the Clean Line is an enquiry into the talismanic power that a source of order can possess for the poet who lives in a disordered world. It is what drives Mallarmé's 'fury against the formless'. Sometimes it may be found in a longed-for sense of psychological detachment, as when Laforgue invents the figure of Pierrot. Or it may be the craft and genius of a former age, safely removed from the alienating cities of today, such as Eliot finds in Dante, or in Gautier's chiseled verse. For Pierre Reverdy, the clean line of order may come from a Cubist painting; for Ezra Pound, it may be an epiphany of angled sunlight fallen on stone in Provence; for Apollinaire, the shockingly original analogies he draws between physical eroticism and trench warfare.Stephen Romer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tours, and Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford.

An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy‿s childhood memories. In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L‿écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"‿a formal act of commemoration‿Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: “My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence.â€? Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father‿s silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet‿s mother.   At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélÿne, the poet‿s parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son‿the solitary boy‿s intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before. Â

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.Robert Herrick was born in London in 1591 and went to St. John's College, Cambridge. He became a Cavalier poet before being ordained in 1623. Charles I gave him the living of Dean Prior in 1629 where he wrote some of his best work including Hesperides, published in 1648. He died in 1674.