DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Orpheus in the Bronx

Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry

Reginald Shepherd author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Michigan Press

Published:30th Jan '08

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Orpheus in the Bronx cover

What unifies the essays in ""Orpheus in the Bronx"", writes author Reginald Shepherd, ""is a resolute defense of poetry's autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers."" Among the pieces in ""Orpheus in the Bronx"": an unflinchingly honest meditation on the author's personal history and development as a writer and poet, a development that for many writers is often framed within the context of privilege - something Shepherd himself never had access to; an examination of the urban pastoral, which is an exploration, according to Shepherd, of ""the splendor and misery of cities in which the cityscape is an active character, a presence that conditions and shapes the poems as much as it is appropriated and shaped by them""; and an essay on beauty and its meanings and forms.

Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift - the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings. - James Longenbach

  • Commended for National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) 2008

ISBN: 9780472099986

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 344g

200 pages