THE CRESCENT MOON BOOK OF METAPHYSICAL POETRYEdited and introduced by Charlotte Greene. With a new picture gallery, and additional poems for this edition. All of the major and many of the minor Metaphysical poets are featured in this anthology, including: John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Sir William Davenant, the Countess of Sidney Godolphin, Richard Crashaw, John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, Richard Lovelace, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Stanley. The Metaphysical poetic style is witty, learned, subjective, sensual, intellectual, reflective, philosophical, baroque, intense, and sometimes ecstatic. Metaphysical poetry was passion and emotion modified by intellect/ ('passionate ratiocination' Herbert Grierson called it), while T.S. Eliot described John Donne's poetry as experience modified by (his) sensibility. Helen Gardener said that Metaphysical verse was 'an expanded epigram', and Margaret Willy called it 'feeling thought'. Metaphysical poetry used satire and irony, as well as the new science (biology, mathematics, cosmology and microcosmic emphasis). It is a poetry concerned with living for the present, with philosophical and religious subjects - with, in short, the soul. It is a dramatic poetry, essentially lyrical, often rough at the edges, with a love of individualized verse forms and writing poems as long as needed to be. After the adherence to traditional stanzas of Elizabethan poetry (the sonnet being the most obvious type), the Metaphysical poets employed a wide variety of forms and metrical patterns. Thomas Traherne for example, wrote in a new verse form each time he composed a poem. Poets such as Vaughan, Traherne and Marvell give the impression of writing until they've finished what they wanted to say. Their poetic forms were open - a short line here, an extended stanza there, as the subject required. Metaphysical poetry was partly 'Classical', partly 'Christian' and partly 'religious'; it was partly humanist, partly Cavalier and partly Elizabethan. John Donne, for example, was just as much Elizabethan, post-Petrarchan, Renaissance and 'Classical' as 'Metaphysical'. Some critics separate the Metaphysical poets' love poems from their religious ones. The distinction may be useful, but it is not how poets write. The boundaries between profane/ sacred, love/ religion, secular/ divine is not that clearly marked by the poets themselves. The 'religious' poems of the Metaphysical poets are often their most erotic. They write of God, the beloved, and their relationship to him, in erotic terms. In poems such as 'The World', for example, Henry Vaughan narrates the old notion of the soul mystically married to the Bridegroom (God). With an introduction and bibliography. The text has been revised for this edition, with new poems added. Includes a new picture gallery. Also available in an E-book edition. www.crmoon.com.
THE CRESCENT MOON BOOK OF MYSTICAL POETRYEdited and introduced by Carol Appleby The mystical poets featured here include William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Crashaw, Percy Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Herbert, Longfellow, Gerald Hopkins, Thomas Traherne, William Shakespeare, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, D.H. Lawrence and anonymous mediaeval works, such as The Cloud of Unknowing. The mystical poetry in English in this book takes in pantheism in nature poetry (in the work of Wordsworth, Whitman, Coleridge and Keats), as well the more orthodox Christian poetry (in the poesie of Donne, and Traherne). Although most of the writers here are British, the book includes some American writers: Henry Longfellow, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is the grand master of pantheistic poetry, a truly abundant poet, one of the most exuberant voices in poetry. He simply could not stop himself from writing like a flood. Many mystical poets are like this: the experience ignites them, and sets the words flowing. Some mystics and mystical poets write long works, in order to circumscribe their experience (think of St John of the Cross, or Meister Eckhart, Dante Alighieri or William Wordsworth). With an introduction and bibliography. The text has been revised for this edition, with new poems added. Includes a new gallery of poets. Also available in an E-book edition. www.crmoon.com.
THE CRESCENT MOON BOOK OF ROMANTIC POETRYEdited and introduced by L.M. Poole The great Romantics poets are featured in this anthology - William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Clare - as well as many lesser-known women poets. New poems have been added for this edition, plus a new gallery of portraits of poets. FROM THE INTRODUCTION The Romantic poets wrote some of the greatest nature poetry in world literature, as the poems collected here demonstrate. Coleridge's poetry, for instance, was very sensitive to weather; his depressions would either result in rheumatism or poetry. Much of Lord Byron's 'Childe Harold' was concerned with lyrical descriptions of exotic landscapes. The elemental powers of nature are very much to the fore in poems such as William Cowper's 'To the Nightingale', Charlotte Smith's 'To the South Downs' and 'Beachy Head', William Blake's 'Night', Mary Robinson's 'Written After Successive Nights of Melancholy Dream', Helen Maria Williams' 'Sonnet: To the Torrid Zone', Barbara Hoole's Ullswater sonnet, much of the poetry of John Clare and Emily Brontë, and of course the king of Romantic nature poetry, William Wordsworth (in poems such as 'Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey', 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', 'I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud' and of course 'The Prelude'). With an introduction and bibliography. The text has been revised for this edition, with new poems added. Plus a portrait gallery of poets. Also available in an e-book edition. www.crmoon.com.
FRIEDRICH HOLDERLIN: HOLDERLIN'S SONGS OF LIGHT: SELECTED POEMS Translated by Michael Hamburger and edited and introduced by Jeremy Mark Robinson The German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843) is one of the very greatest poets - of any era. Holderlin's poetry is airy, radiant and incredibly lyrical. This selection features many of his best odes, poems and hymns, from the whole span of his career. Michael Hamburger is a respected poet and critic. He has translated Rilke, Celan and Goethe, among others, as well the whole of Holderlin's poetry. Hamburger's awards include The Schlegel-Tieck Prize, the Goethe Medal and the European Translation Prize. 'Few can have done more to enhance (and in many cases create) the appreciation of German poetry among an Anglophone audience' (Times Literary Supplement) ¿ Includes the German text and English translations. The book has been revised. Illustrated, with images of Holderlin and biographical pictures. With introduction and bibliography. European Writers Series. Notes & bibliography & illustrations. www.crmoon.com Friedrich Holderlin was born Johann Friedrich Holderlin on March 20, 1770 in Lauffen, a Swabian town on the River Neckar. He spent much of his later years, following a mental breakdown, in a house in Tubingen, until his death in 1843. For Ronald Peacock, Holderlin was the poet of 'radiant purity', 'the one whose name can be uttered only in the tone of veneration'. The chief love in Friedrich Holderlin's life was Susette Borkenstein Gontard (1769-1802), the 'beautiful, cultured and noble' wife of a Frankfurt banker, J.F. Gontard. Holderlin taught Gontard's children. He idealized Susette Gontard: she became his Muse, the Diotima in his poetry. 'Schones Leben! du lebst, wie die zarten Bluthen im Winter', Holderlin wrote in 'To Diotima'. Just as Novalis worshipped his beloved Sophie as an embodiment of Sophia (Wisdom), a Goddess of transcendent philosophy, so Holderlin apostrophized Susette Gontard as Diotima in poems such as 'Diotima', 'To Diotima', 'To Her Genius' and 'Menon's Lament for Diotima'. Diotima was the hero's beloved in Holderlin's novel Hyperion. Many poems are addressed to Diotima, and she is the subject of many pieces. It was with his relationship with Susette Gontard that Holderlin's poetry began to develop rapidly, achieving a depth and lyricism far beyond the early poems. Susette, as Diotima, was crucial in this poetic development.
Mel Brooks: Genius and Loving ItFreedom and Liberation in the Cinema of Mel Brooksby Thomas A. Christie Beloved by his fans and equally praised and derided by the critics many times throughout his long career, Mel Brooks is a creative polymath, a comic talent to be reckoned with - influential, fearless and totally unafraid of his detractors. Yet whether you admire his work or not, one thing remains absolutely certain: this larger-than-life character is a very difficult man to ignore. Mel Brooks has been immortalised as the definitive maestro of big-screen bad taste, a pioneer of the cinematic spoof (and very influential, too - you can see Brooks' influence in many places today). But throughout his film-making career, his ardent championship of personal liberty is too often neglected. Examining all eleven of the movies that Brooks directed, from The Producers (1968) to Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), this book examines the way that this most distinctive of cinematic visionaries came to earnestly and vigourously defend freedom in all of its forms, whether creative, individual, social, cultural or political. As well as famous films like The Producers ('If you've got it, flaunt it, baby!'), Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein ('Frankenstein?' 'Fronkensteen'), this book also looks at lesser-known Brooks movies such as 12 Chairs, Silent Movie and Life Stinks. Includes a detailed filmography, movie statistics, examples of critical opinions, a guide to further reading, and a bibliography. Fully illustrated, with stills from all of Mel Brooks' movies. ISBN 9781861715203. 404 pages. www.crmoon.com 'Thomas Christie's scholarship is as always immaculate. Full marks to him for another informative, well written and erudite guide to a neglected director and episode of film history.' (Review of John Hughes and Eighties Cinema) Douglas J. Allen (Lecturer in Social Sciences, Motherwell College)
THE ROMANCE OF LUST by Anonymous The Romance of Lust is a clasic novel of English erotica, first published in 1873-76. The Romance of Lust relates the sexual adventures of Charlie Roberts in Victorian England. This edition includes ilustrations of erotic art from the 1870s period of the book. Illustrated. 452pp. ISBN 9781861713629. www.crmoon.com
LAND ART IN THE U.S.A. A new study of land art in America, featuring all of the well-known land artists from the ¿golden age¿ of land art - the 1960s - to the present day. Fully illustrated, with a bibliography. EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he¿s been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site æsthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists. For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were ¿the more compelling artists today, concerned with ¿Place¿ or ¿Site¿¿. Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith¿s vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith ¿the agent of endlessness¿. Smith¿s æsthetic became part of Smithson¿s view of art as a complete ¿site¿, not simply an æsthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were ¿in some way disrupted or pulverized¿. He said he was looking for a ¿denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty¿. Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: ¿I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation¿. Smithson¿s theory of the ¿non-site¿ was based on ¿absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence¿. Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the ¿non-site¿ and ¿site¿ are both interacting. In the ¿non-site¿ work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. ¿The land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Non-Site) rather than the art is placed on the ground. The Non-Site is a container within another container ¿ the room¿. William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas¿s books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.
JOHN COWPER POWYS A new collection of essays on John Cowper Powys (1872-1963). H.W. Fawkner's essay "Venus" explores issues of reading, movement, love and sex, the 'amorous self', and affectivity in A Glastonbury Romance. Ian Hughes looks at the genre of Powys's novels, and how the philosophical romances were influenced by Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean. Janina Nordius discusses the crucial Powys theme of (transcendental) solitude in the key novel of the Powys-self alone, Wolf Solent. Joe Boulter's essay concentrates on the affinities between modernism and postmodernism, pragmatism and deconstruction, in one of Powys's late novels, The Inmates, via thinkers such as William James, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. ? By the time he started writing his most admired works around 1929 - the four Wessex novels (Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle), the two Welsh epics (Owen Glendower and Porius), and the unsurpassed Autobiography - John Cowper Powys was in his late fifties. By then, he had already been a philosopher, a successful lecturer (with packed-out lectures in the U.S.A.), a storyteller, a would-be magician and a poet. Powys loved writing, whether it was letters, essays, novels or philosophical commentaries. He lived mainly from his writing after 1930, after nearly 30 years of lecturing (mainly in the United States). He produced many books, which included novels, philosophical essays, poetry, correspondence and literary criticism. Some of the writers that Powys knew personally included Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Hardy, William Barnes, W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Richardson, Aleister Crowley and Bertrand Russell. In America, Powys was friends with Dreiser, Edna Vincent Millay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Arthur Davison Ficke. He also met E.E. Cummings, Amy Lowell, Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Ford Maddox Ford and Will Durant, and performers such as Charlie Chaplin and Isadora Duncan.
TOMMY: KEN RUSSELL: THE WHO: POCKET MOVIE GUIDEBy Jeremy Mark Robinson. Tommy is a 1975 movie based on the rock opera by the British pop band Who and directed by British genius Ken Russell. Shamelessly over-the-top, silly, wild, dynamic, primitive, glitzy and violent, Tommy ain't subtle: it presents pop psychology which's crude as a sledgehammer, symbolism which's heavy-handed like a pinball machine hurled out of a hotel onto Sunset Strip; it's decked out in Pop Art colours and costumes by way of glam rock; it's proudly and bizarrely English and parochial and provincial; it's perverse and kinky; it's shrill and hysterical; and it contains some of the finest music every included in a musical movie. If Richard Wagner was making movies out of his music in the 1970s, this is what it would look like. Tommy would have to rank in the top three of anyone's Ken Russell films. It's one of those movies where every element comes together beautifully, and where everyone in the production seems to be working at their best. Tommy's not perfect, but you wouldn't want to change anything. This book features lengthy chapters on every aspect of director Ken Russell. A filmmaker like no other, Russell remains one of cinema's extraordinary talents, a creator of masterpieces such as The Devils, Tommy and The Music Lovers, and a body of work that flies from the pastoral, Romantic lyricism of Delius: Song of Summer and Elgar to the wild extremes of Lisztomania, Altered States and Mahler. Plus chapters on the Who; appendices on Quadrophenia; filmographies and discographies; and bibliography; quotes by Russell, resources, video and DVD availability, and fans on Tommy. Fully illustrated, including images of the Who, musicals of Tommy, and inspirations. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861715050. 312 pages.www.crmoon.comJEREMY MARK ROBINSON has written many critical studies, including Hayao Miyazaki, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard, and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, plus literary monographs on: J.R.R. Tolkien; Samuel Beckett; Thomas Hardy; André Gide; Robert Graves; and Lawrence Durrell.
PERFORMANCE: DONALD CAMMELL: NIC ROEG: POCKET MOVIE GUIDEby Jeremy Mark Robinson This book explores Performance, a classic movie co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg and starring Mick Jagger, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg, released in 1970. Among the supporting cast were Michele Breton, Ann Sidney, Johnny Shannon and Anthony Valentine. 'A perverted love affair between Homo Sapiens and Lady Violence', was how Jagger and Cammell described Performance in their telegram to the president of Warners, Ted Ashley. Performance was a tale of a British gangster on the run who goes to ground in the basement of a reclusive pop star's mansion in London's Powis Square, Notting Hill. Like 1966's Blow-Up (directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, written by Antonioni, Tonino Guerra and Edward Bond), Performance has become a classic portrayal of late 1960s (British) pop culture, and of the London scene. The book includes chapters on the culture, gangster and pop music worlds of Performance, on directors Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell, on Mick Jagger, and on links to the movie, such as Kenneth Anger and Aleister Crowley. Although Donald Cammell's credits consist of a very few titles as a film director - Performance (1970), Demon Seed (1977), White of the Eye (1987) and Wild Side (1995) - he remains one of the most fascinating of British filmmakers. Appendices include films linked to Performance, such as Sympathy For the Devil, Fitzcarraldo, The Man Who Fell To Earth and Stoned. Fans and critics on Performance. Fully illustrated (including images from the movie, from Cammell's and Roeg's films, from the Rolling Stones, and from the 1960s period of Performance). Bibliography, filmographies and notes. ISBN 9781861715012. 292 pages.www.crmoon.comJEREMY MARK ROBINSON has written many critical studies, including Hayao Miyazaki, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Luc Godard, and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, plus literary monographs on: J.R.R. Tolkien; Samuel Beckett; Thomas Hardy; André Gide; Robert Graves; and Lawrence Durrell.
BLADE RUNNER: POCKET MOVIE GUIDE This book is a guide to the 1982 movie made from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick - Blade Runner. A thorough exploration of Blade Runner forms the core of the book, looking at the conception, production, themes, critical reception and influence of the 1982 Warner Brothers movie in every detail. Philip Kindred Dick (1928-1982) was a key figure in 20th century science fiction, famous for embracing drugs and the counter-culture in his work. Dick's fiction includes The Man In the High Castle, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Valis, The Divine Invasion, Martian Time-Slip, The Minority Report, and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Dick's themes included perception and reality, drugs, state control, global capitalism, surveillance, and paranoia. On its initial release, Blade Runner grossed $27 million in the United States, placing it no. 16 in that year's box office chart (it was released on June 25, 1982, in 1,290 theatres in the U.S.A.). 1982 was the year, of course, of E.T. The films that came in way behind Steven Spielberg's Universal fantasy were Tootsie at no. 2, An Officer and a Gentleman third, and Rocky 3 in fourth place. Other sci-fi and fantasy flicks in 1982 included Star Trek 2, Conan the Barbarian, Mad Max 2 and The Thing. Blade Runner is often trotted out as another big, important picture that flopped on its theatrical release. That isn't quite true, but it certainly wasn't a hit movie by any standards. The opening weekend was pretty good, but the movie seemed to fade away rapidly after that. Many reviewers and critics came out against Blade Runner on its first release, including Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, Sheila Benson, and Janet Maslin. 'Muddled', 'gruesome', 'pretentious' and 'overheated' were some of the words used to describe it. Since then, Blade Runner has rightly achieved cult as well as classic status. Its influence on science fiction and sci-fi cinema has been enormous (this book looks at some of the movies inspired by Blade Runner, including Ghost In the Shell, Akira, Brazil and Batman). Fully illustrated. Pocket size. Bibliography, filmography and notes. ISBN 971861714251. www.crmoon.com
LAND ART IN THE U.S.A. A study of land art in America, featuring all of the well-known land artists from the 'golden age' of land art - the 1960s - to the present day. This book explores all of the major American land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, as well as European land artists working in North America. The book includes chapters on James Turrell and his vast volcano site ¿ Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks ¿ Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks ¿ Robert Morris's environments and observatories ¿ Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field and Earth Room ¿ Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles ¿ Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes ¿ Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions ¿ Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures ¿ and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre. And Europeans such as: Hans Haacke's Conceptual art ¿ Richard Long and his art of walking ¿ Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures ¿ and Christo's wrapped buildings and islands. EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he's been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site aesthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists. For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were 'the more compelling artists today, concerned with 'Place' or 'Site''. Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith's vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith 'the agent of endlessness'. Smith's aesthetic became part of Smithson's view of art as a complete 'site', not simply an aesthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were 'in some way disrupted or pulverized'. He said he was looking for a 'denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty'. Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: 'I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation'. Smithson's theory of the 'non-site' was based on 'absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence'. Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the 'non-site' and 'site' are both interacting. In the 'non-site' work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. 'The land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Non-Site) rather than the art is placed on the ground. The Non-Site is a container within another container - the room'. William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available. Fully illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861714060. 328 pages. www.crmoon.com
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