Thursday, April 09, 2009

3 recommended books

(N.B. Any future posts will be @ http://www.omoopart5.blogspot.com/)



In addition to the latest Iain Sinclair of course, I recommend Michael Horovitz' A NEW WASTE LAND, subtitled Timeship Earth at Nillennium, from New Departures, London, 2007, a large work of prose, poetry, photographs, cartoons, collage, commentary, notes, and invective from the man of whom Kathleen Raine had written: "He is a morally engaged poet and a trenchant critic of social corruption, not so much from a political standpoint but rather from the perspective of the "politics of eternity" of William Blake." And on faith, because I haven't seen it yet, THE MABINOGI by John K. Bollard, a new translation of the ancient Welsh text.

Sunday, April 05, 2009

Leonard Cohen : An Appreciation

Leonard Cohen's poetry is more in a tradition of King David than of his mentor and friend, Irving Layton, to whom THE BOOK OF LONGING is dedicated.

Living on Hydra, with Marianna and her young son, Axel, in the 1960's, he learned to speak fluent Greek, and it is this knowledge, care, and precision, which, over 30 years later, permitted him to render Cavafy's great poem, THE GOD ABANDONS ANTONY, into the extraordinary lyric, ALEXANDRA LEAVING.