'The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge for criminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in textiles, and the upper Calder became "the hardest-worked river in England". Throughout my lifetime, since 1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attenda...
Selected Poems (Essential Poets, #73)
by Emile Nelligan and Paul F. Widdows
In 1992, critically acclaimed poet James Ragan was in Los Angeles when riots exploded across racial and class lines. That same year he was also living in Prague when Czechoslovakia divided into two separate nations, motivated by the principles of "nationalism." This odd coincidence forms the crux of his new, eagerly anticipated book of poetry. The poems in The Hunger Wall, named for a wall near the Prague Castle, take these two cultural sensibilities that seem worlds apart and explore the subtle...
Sidetracks, Bei Dao’s first new collection in almost fifteen years, is also the poet’s first long poem and his magnum opus—the artistic culmination of a lifetime devoted to the renewal and reinvention of language. “As a poet, I am always lost,” Bei Dao once said. Opening with a prologue of heavenly questions and followed by thirty-four cantos, Sidetracks travels forward and backward along the divergent paths of the poet’s wandering life—from his time as a Young Pioneer in Beijing, through the ye...