Bøger af David R. Slavitt

Death Benefits deepens and extends David R. Slavitt's sublime, lyric confrontation with mortality--and does so in a plainspoken and marvelously entertaining, conversational way. His poetry encourages us to recognize our own predicaments, as we see ourselves reflected as fellow sufferers entrapped by daily circumstance. In his new collection, Slavitt presents a sequence of one hundred sonnets, each one loaded with life, observation, and quicksilver wit. Readers will delight in looking on with wonder, at every turn of the page, to see how the poet will pull it off this time and what kind of linguistic magic he will use to fend off the mortal pain of getting through each day. His voice plays over the grid of the meter in utterly natural intonations. His music squarely faces the dark, but its enduring note is faith in common sense and the pleasure that poetry provides, rather than cynicism or despair.

As he enters his sixth decade of publishing poetry, David Slavitt remains a determined wildcatter who ranges as far as he thinks necessary to drill for meaning. In his new collection, Slavitt traverses Africa, India, Israel, and the America in which he finds himself, as he searches for clues from which he might learn at least a little.

In The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Poems, veteran poet David R. Slavitt touches on topics from the mundane to the mysterious with his signature wit and intelligence. In Stupid, for instance, he transforms a simple head cold into an appreciation for the richness of consciousness, and in Waking, the very effort of rising from bed becomes something like a miracle: I heave myself up to a sitting position, pause / a moment, and am amazed by what I have done . . . . Slavitt explores the range of the human condition with such ease and insight that readers cannot help but ponder what life isand what it could be. What if, like the mythic sea creature in The Dogfish, humans could return to the womb when frightened? In the collections title poem, Slavitt gives a voice to the Seven Deadly Sins, each of which claims, persuasively, to possess a value to humans that is seldom noticed or appreciated. Slavitt has a unique ability to examine an idea, be it virtue or vice, dark or blithe, and to offer perspective and wisdom about the conundrums of our existence.

The seventy-third book by David Slavitt, the prolific poet, novelist, translator, and editor. This is the work of an accomplished veteran, a craftsman who laments the limitations of what his hard-earned talent can do in the face of age and loss.

David Slavitt's affectionate translations of epigrams by sixteenth-century Welsh academic John Owen transmute a careful selection of the writer's work into a vision of life, and in so doing bring Owen into conversation with the present day.

In this volume David Slavitt brings together eight poems that deal largely with the mind's relation to history, personal history, and the history of myth and of empires. In addressing these two seemingly independent modes of thinking and remembering, Slavitt reveals that they are closely related, and both part of our poetic consciousness.

In his newest volume of verse, David Slavitt offers some of his finest poetry to date. Equinox is a collection of twenty-five poems on various subjects. They are occasional, in that most of them are the result of specific moments of experience, whether of an art work or a moment of natural beauty.

A collection of poems, translations, imitations, parodies, jeux de mots, and jeux d'esprit, work that ranges from grief-stricken brooding to exuberant clowning around. Few contemporary poets display David Slavitt's range of sensibility and response to the various occasions of chaotic existence in our time.

A selection of recent work as well as the best from thirteen volumes of poetry published across four decades, Change of Address highlights the magnitude and scope of David Slavitt's poetic achievement. This retrospective collection brings into sharp relief Slavitt's intelligence, strength of voice, and ease in varied poetic forms.

Epic poem, biography, literary criticism, historical romance, in A Gift, David Slavitt presents the fascinating life of Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, one of history's great unknowns, a man blessed and cursed by his conviction that within him lay the capacity for literary greatness.

This devastatingly satiric and funny book, David R. Slavitt's fiftieth, is a complicated burlesque that turns out to be a moving story of human frailty and spiritual rebirth. It is a feat of literary legerdemain that will dazzle even admirers of Slavitt's Turkish Delights, Lives of the Saints, Salazar Blinks and The Hussar.

In his twelfth book of original verse David Slavitt leads us to a crossroads where terror, loneliness, and despair are transfigured by love and art. Throughout this collection Slavitt's keen intelligence, wry humour, and deep compassion shine through. Crossroads allows us to observe a poet working at the peak of his powers.

The bravura of David R. Slavitt's first book of poems, published more than fifty years ago, continues to reverberate through his newest collection in a voice matured and roughened by age. Civil Wars encourages contemplation of the world and writing rather than acceptance of the thoughts of the critic.

An accomplished poet and a keen observer of the human condition, David Slavitt deploys both skills to create the whimsical, insightful, and witty poems of The Octaves.

"A wonderfully disorienting title for a wonderfully orienting book. Deeply instructive, entirely delightful."-Henry Taylor The prodigiously imaginative mind and penetrating wit of David R. Slavitt are on full display in his newest collection of poetry that is perhaps his most engaging to date. The title poem begins by fooling around-"With three names like that, it sounds as though his mother is calling him and she's really angry"-but then builds into a shrewd, thoughtful account of the life of the ninth U.S. president. A second long poem offers a fresh and very amusing appraisal of the practice of buying, writing, and sending souvenir postcards. In between this pair, there are shorter pieces impressive in their range and tone and theme (be sure to read "Poem without Even One Word") that dazzle in an already glittering body of work. Slavitt's poems can be playful, even silly, and then astonishingly convert levity into earnest urgency. Dark lines glint with the light of intelligence and mirth, even as artful puns and jokes reveal a rueful aspect. The poet gets older but his work is as graceful as ever, the lovable little boy signaling from inside the sometimes-cranky septuagenarian.

In these fourteen beautifully crafted stories David Slavitt shows his mastery of the form. Elegant, spare, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac, this collection reflects a writer in admirable control of his craft.

This volume of poetry illustrates a new side of the author of The Carnivore and Suits for the Dead. The wit, the toughness, the shining lyric clarity of the earlier books are still here, but they have been joined by a quiet understanding, a joyfulness, and an acceptance of things as they are that indicates the poet has moved into a new and exciting period.

Slavitt puts Virgil's poems in their biographical and historical context and provides analyses of the "Eclogues", the "Georgics", and the "Aeneid". He also looks at Virgil's continuing popularity and at the legends that grew up about him in the Middle Ages as a magician or necromancer.

Directly or obliquely, while reading Gibbon or shopping for toys at F.A.O. Schwarz, Slavitt addresses, invokes, or simply enjoys the civilization that has been the poet's true subject from the time of the wandering bards. Upon the foundation of technical mastery, he has begun to build an oeuvre to assert himself, and, with insouciance and gaiety, to grow into his majority.