Wow! eBook
Without Saying: New Poems POETR Edition
Author(s): Richard Howard (Author)
- Publisher: Turtle Point Press
- Publication Date: 2 Dec. 2008
- Edition: POETR
- Language: English
- Print length: 128 pages
- ISBN-10: 1933527145
- ISBN-13: 9781933527147
Book Description
In Richard Howard’s new collection, voices of myth and memory prevail, if only by means of prevarication: the voice of Medea’s mother trying to explain her daughter’s odd behavior to an indiscreet interviewer; or first and last the voice of Henry James, late in life, faced with the disputed prospect of meeting L. Frank Baum and then, later on, “managing” not only Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird but his own unruly cast of characters, including Mrs. Wharton and young Hugh Walpole.
Richard Howard’s honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN Medal for Translation, and grants from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Few American poets are as urbane as Howard, whose dramatic monologues, verse epistles, and, in this book, voice-mail messages in the personae of famous modernist writers and artists, odd historical figures, and their and his friends have been amusing and bemusing readers for five decades. This collection begins with a set of letters about the 1904 attempt to effect a luncheon meeting of Henry James and L. Frank Baum and ends with Hugh Walpole’s memoir of Edith Wharton’s machinations to get James the Nobel Prize, which he apparently never noticed, though he understood at a glance what Walpole’s brief murmurings with a theater usher portended: sex, of course, which Howard reminds us underlies the social facades and undergirds the identity of even the desperately cultivated, from preadolescence (“School Days”) to burgeoning manhood (“Pederasty,” the translation of sonnet by the teenage Proust) to looming senescence (“Mind under Matter”). And so high culture meets the stuff of gossip, to discover that betimes they are twins. In any event, as Howard presents them, they’re utterly, intelligently delightful. –Ray Olson
About the Author
Richard Howard was born in Cleveland in 1929. He is the author of 13 volumes of poetry and has published over 150 translations from the French including works by Gide, Stendhal, De Beauvoir, Baudelaire and De Gaulle. He has edited the Library of America’s edition of the Travel Writing of Henry James. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize.
