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by: Reginald Shepherd
List Price: $18.95Amazon.com's Price: $14.21 You Save: $4.74 (25%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780472069989
ISBN: 0472069985
Label: University of Michigan Press
Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: January 03, 2008
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Sales Rank: 519323
Studio: University of Michigan Press
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'Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift---the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings.'
---James Longenbach
A highly acute writer, scholar, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his work the sensibilities of a classicist and a contemporary theorist, an inheritor of the American high modernist canon, and a poet drawing and playing on popular culture, while simultaneously venturing into formal experimentation.
In the essays collected here, Shepherd offers probing meditations unified by a 'resolute defense of poetry's autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers.' Among the pieces included are an eloquent autobiographical essay setting out in the frankest terms the vicissitudes of a Bronx ghetto childhood; the escape offered by books and 'gifted' status preserved by maternal determination; early loss and the equivalent of exile; and the formation of the writer's vocation. With the same frankness that he brings to autobiography, Shepherd also sets out his reasons for rejecting 'identity politics' in poetry as an unnecessary trammeling of literary imagination. His study of the 'urban pastoral,' from Baudelaire through Eliot, Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to Shepherd's own work, provides a fresh view of the place of urban landscape in American poetry.
Throughout his essays---as in his poetry---Shepherd juxtaposes unabashed lyricism, historical awareness, and in-your-face contemporaneity, bristling with intelligence.
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
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Rating: - About much more than Poetry
Having never heard of Reginald Shepherd before picking up Orpheus in the Bronx, I was expecting nothing more than a collection of poems interspersed with dry musings on poetry and life. What I found myself immediately engrossed in, however, was a rich examination of the life and mind of a bold and unflinching artist.
In this collection of essays, Shepherd not only shares his thoughts on other poets and poetic forms; he also examines the personal influences on his own creative output. ... Read More
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