Coming Soon from Sheep Meadow Press . . .
Unobtrusively but decisively, Stephanos Papadopoulos’ work is informed by various cultures: American, Greek, ancient and modern, French and English as distinguished from American. He follows other poets, but mostly he follows his heart. In his poetry the melancholy of the modern finds its beauty in loss itself. Papadopoulos catches this beauty in poem after poem, while his poetry swims for joy in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Aegean. This beautiful contradiction makes Hôtel Dieu a great pleasure to read and reread. Critic Bengt Jangfeldt states, “Stephanos Papadopoulos has several qualities as a poet, one of the most conspicuous being his talent for the elegiac, his ability to bring to life memories and artifacts from times past.”
Poet, musician, scholar, and singer, Duriel Harris has written an amazing book. As Sterling Plumpp tells us, her work “is a twenty-first century literary text emerging out of the prism of race, gender, and social class. It is eloquently postmodern funk and intimately original.” She does this while telling us in poetry of extraordinarily high order an intimate, personal history, probing with her heart and intelligence into matters she has half passed over or forgotten. Perhaps Amnesiac is a term for tragic hero. In this case the tragic hero is a woman, a poet, and a singer. Sheep Meadow Press will soon produce a Duriel Harris dvd or cd. The reader and listener will be able to find the information at sheepmeadowpress.com by September 2009.
The poet David Slavitt is one of the handful of great translators we have. He is certainly the most versatile. Now he has put himself to the beautiful labor of translating poems from the Greek Anthology. As is the case in all of his translations, the reader finds an absolute clarity of utterance as he moves from one great poet’s voice to another’s. What he has given us is a treasury of Greek poetry to be read again and again. Pure gold.
“Carmen Firan’s beautiful and powerful poems, charged with gloom and passion, recreate her struggles not only with life and love, with her history and ours (and ‘its bloody hangover of the senses’), but with the beasts of language, whether invasive or voracious or fugitive. In this war of words, armed with her ‘dialect of Old Angelic,’ she indisputably wins.”—Harry Mathews
In recent years Joan Crowell has lived an oceanic life a few feet from the surf on the south shore of Long Island: a wife, composer of operas, mother of five children, a great-grandmother—a poet whose writing is sometimes clear as a glass of water, sometimes clouded by personal storms. She has lived a long life of privilege and struggle. What comes through is some honest work touched with beauty, words that should not be lost, useful to others.
