Clare's Empire: Poems

Name: Clare's Empire: Poems
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

Jordan Smith

2014年7月 · The Hydroelectric Press

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The seventh full-length collection of poems from the Edward E. Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College in Schenectady, New York, is a fantasia on the life and work of John Clare. Of his inspiration, Professor Smith writes: "Although it draws on Clare’s writings and on the available biographies, it makes no pretense to biographical accuracy. Clare’s poems interested me because of the combination of a natural sympathy, sometimes sentimental or conventional but often deeply felt especially for creatures or people on the margins, and a ferocity that arose both from the rigors of the natural world and from a sense of injustice at what humans do so readily to that world and to each other. Clare’s life, a series of almost impossible negotiations between ignorance and knowledge, gift and condescension, poetry and privilege, appetite and refinement, seemed to me to raise issues that have hardly gone away: class, liberty, ecological responsibility, the rights of imagination and the rights of property. The intent of the poems is to present moments from that life at a high pitch of tension and to consider how little has changed."

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作者简介

Jordan Smith is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, most recently Clare's Empire (published by The Hydroelectric Press), a fantasia on the life and work of English poet, John Clare, which deals with class and environment, poetry and madness, economy and profligacy, beauty and vulgarity. The subjects of his previous collections range from the landscape of the Mohawk Valley, to fiddle tunes and old time string bands, to fathers and sons, to opera, to rat cheese and ale, to movies, to fishing, to ladies mandolin societies, to the Beats, to cornet solos in a town park gazebo, to the track at Saratoga Springs. Sandra MacPherson wrote about his work that "the Americana seems so throughly a part of these poems, so integrated with their metaphysics, that it's good for the soul." He lives in upstate New York, where he is Edward E. Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.