PURDAH (1) One day they said she was old enough to learn some shame. She found it came quite naturally. Purdah is a kind of safety. The body finds a place to hide. The cloth fans out against the skin… Read More ›
British Literature
Analysis of Joseph Brodsky’s Odysseus to Telemachus
Like many of Joseph Brodsky’s poems, Odysseus to Telemachus examines the corruptive effects of empire on the individual. In Torso (1977), the subject is the Roman Empire, described as “the end of things,” a place where a person finds the… Read More ›
Analysis of Imtiaz Dharker’s No-man’s Land
Imtiaz Dharker calls herself a Scottish Muslim Calvinist and writes in English. Her No-man’s Land first appeared in her second volume of poetry, Postcards from God. This poem begins with a stark visual image and a hair-raising auditory one: “A… Read More ›
Analysis of Les Murray’s New Hieroglyphics
New Hieroglyphics is representative of Les Murray’s later creative works. In the preface to The Paperbark Tree (1992), in which this poem first appears, Murray writes: “Poetry is the principle that controls reality.” The pronouncement is significant in suggesting the… Read More ›
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda loved the rural, claiming that his poetry “gathers up earth and rain and fruit.” Yet he also loved the energy of cities, the music of busy marketplaces. He was loyal to his people of Chile even as their… Read More ›
Negritude Movement
Emerging in France in the 1930s and 1940s, the Negritude Movement comprised French-speaking Caribbean and African writers who sought to challenge European dominance and create Black consciousness. Its principal founders include Aimé Césaire of Martinique, who coined the term négritude… Read More ›
Analysis of Boris Pasternak’s My Sister, Life
Pasternak said that the 50 poems that My Sister, Life comprises should be read and understood as a whole. The book describes a time both in the life of the poetic speaker and in the life of his country. The… Read More ›
Analysis of Myres, Alexandria, A.D. 340 Constantine P. Cavafy
Myres, Alexandria, A.D. 340 is one of Constantine Cavafy’s longest and most dramatic poems, centered around the elusive character of Myres, whose appropriation by different systems of signification—the pagan-cultivated, homosexual hedonism of Alexandria and the emerging, puritanical austerity of Christianity—is… Read More ›
Analysis of Lorna Goodison’s My Last Poem
This is the first of Lorna Goodison’s poems on her relation with poetry, and it is also the first of her second collection, I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Books, 1986). The contradiction between the poem’s title and… Read More ›
Analysis of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s Mourning on the Washing-Line in January
This poem from his best-known collection, written shortly before his death in 1975, depicts “a / freshly washed pair of / black tights” hanging on a wire “between two / bare trees.” The poem exemplifies many of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s… Read More ›
Modernism and Poetry
Modernism, poetry and the term modernism, with or without capitalization, has inspired a vast literature of definition, commentary, and contentious discussion. Nuanced, scholarly distinctions dividing proto- or early modernism from high modernism and from spin-offs like Anglo-American modernism fill library… Read More ›
Analysis of Ivan Lalić’s Mnemosyne: An Ode to Memory
The consequence of history—erasure—is a common theme in Ivan Lalić’s oeuvre. But instead of wallowing in what is lost, he focuses on the remains, which most often take the form of memory. As such, it is fitting that of all… Read More ›
Analysis of Adonis’s A Mirror to Khalida
This poem is made up of five movements, each with a subtitle. It was published in 1968 in the collection Al-Masrah wa’l-Maraya (Theater and Mirrors), in which the poet attempts polyphonic lyricism. Adonis has always been preoccupied with the relationship… Read More ›
Analysis of René Char’s The Meteor of August 13th
In several respects Le Météore du 13 août is typical of char’s work, particularly of the collection Furor and Mystery, in which it appeared in 1947. In general terms, the poem is a series of images that must be understood… Read More ›
Analysis of Nicanor Parra’s Memories of Youth
Although Nicanor Parra characterizes his later works as “ecopoetry” (see Ecopoetics), his first volumes belong to an earlier movement, which he termed “antipoetry.” While the title of Parra’s second volume (Poemas y antipoemas) announced Parra’s new concept of the antipoem… Read More ›
Analysis of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Marvellous Grass
Marvellous Grass There you were in your purple vestments half-way through the Mass, an ordained priest under your linen alb and chasuble and stole: and when you saw my face in the crowd for Holy Communion the consecrated host fell… Read More ›
Analysis of Anja Utler’s marsyas, encircled
The long poem marsyas, umkreist (marsyas, encircled) from Anja Utler’s volume münden—entzüngeln (merging—untonguing, 2004) evokes and reinvents a mythological protagonist’s execution by gradual skinning. According to classical Greek mythology, the satyr and flute player Marsyas challenges the god Apollo to… Read More ›
Analysis of César Vallejo’s A Man Walks by with a Loaf of Bread on His Shoulder
At a time when the arts in European capitals tended toward “art for art’s sake,” not realism or social concern, César Vallejo delineated the paradox of conscientious intellectuals whose life of the mind involves metaphysical concerns, while their daily lives… Read More ›
Analysis of Thomas Kling’s Manhattan Mouthspace Two
During an unpublished conversation in Cologne, Germany, in 2003, two years before his premature death, Thomas Kling, who had visited New York City briefly a decade before and who planned to visit the United States for a series of poetry… Read More ›
Analysis of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s Looking for Poetry
In Looking for Poetry, from A rosa do povo (Rose of the People, 1945), Carlos Drummond de Andrade investigates the writing process through a succession of negations. As the title suggests, patience and the ability to respect poetry’s caprices are… Read More ›
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