Elemental Natures draws together thirty years of poetic practice, with substantial selections from six previous books of poetry, including the sequence "No One Comes For Penelope- ", a retelling of the end of the Odyssey that teases the reader with conflicting views of time and reality. The essay, "The American Voice", looks at three iconic American poets, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, and Robert Lowell, emphasizing an entirely different viewpoint of what is unique to the American voice in poetry, focusing on its largesse, passion, excess, and ability to recover in confronting and making sense of our lives. His poetry is central to his creative output, work variously called "inspiring" "visionary" "vibrant" "post- Keatsian" "passionate" "unabashed by sensuality and feeling"; "a voice beyond epoch ... but rooted in Los Angeles", dedicated "to the welfare of planet earth", work variously compared to Browning, Auden, and in its freedom, Pablo Neruda.
Vorwort
This collection presents thirty years of visionary poems on nature, human nature, and love, including a novel version of the end of The Odyssey and a new perspective on American poetry.
Autorentext
Lance Lee is a poet, playwright (Time's Up and Other Plays), novelist (Second Chances) and writer on drama and screenwriting (A Poetics for Screenwriters, and The Death and Life of Drama). His six previous volumes of poetry are listed under "Previous Books". Seasons of Defiance was a 2010 USA National Best Books Award finalist. Transformations (2013) uniquely combines art and poetry with the collaboration of a number of noted artists. His poems appear widely in America and England, between which his family is split. A past Creative Writing Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, his home is in Los Angeles, where he has also taught at a number of leading universities. Also an environmentalist, he was instrumental in forming the California State Park system in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Zusammenfassung
Praise for Elemental NaturesLance Lee's Elemental Natures draws together in one inspiring new volume a powerful selection of works These attest to the far-reaching intelligence and perceptive insights of a remarkable talentfrom Lance Lee's respect for the classical tradition to the vigor of all-consuming human love to the welfare of planet earth as well as our common awesome as well as awful experiences. In living with these works, I could not help coming away with a sense of poetic maturity and mastery. Tom Tolnay, editor and publisher, Birch Brook Press, USElemental Natures draws from a career spread over thirty years Our complexities and place in the world are central in his work, while Late Spring brings his difficult father marvelously to life as Lee investigates himself, his family, and mixed gentile and Jewish background. Here is a poet writing with the richness of the Romantics who looks hard at reality and expresses himself with passion and honesty, pulling the reader in. Myra Schneider, Lifting the Sky, UKElemental Natures is a beautiful accomplishment, an expanse of poems born of one man's 'life-wish'unsettling, full-blooded, tenderthat shows life's energy pressing up against the margins of mortality with a vibrant, sensuous intelligence He offers a way to share and celebrate multiple aspects of being alive within the vitality of art itself as well as within our great archetypal myths, which he makes uniquely intimate and essential. Pamela Stewart, Infrequent Mysteries, US