A Poetry Month Reading List

6 new books on poets and poetry, from British Romanticism to Moroccan Leftism.

In honor of National Poetry Month—a now 20-year strong tradition—we’ve pulled together a few of our latest books celebrating the genre and its many diverse cultural traditions, including an anthology, a novel, a biography, and a bevy of poetry analysis and criticism.

The Full Severity of Compassion »
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

by CHANA KRONFELD

The late Yehuda Amichai, widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and perhaps the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, was, in life, never interested in playing the role of the Great Poet. Such is the observation of Chana Kronfeld whose account of Amichai and his work (described as “penetrating” by the New York Times) blends a critical literary perspective with personal insights derived from her own lifelong friendship with him. Lionized by the literary canon, Amichai became required reading in Israel and beyond. Yet despite his notoriety, he remained always the “everyman” of the genre, whose accessible poetic style contained profound political and theological reflections, the nuances of which are often lost in prevailing interpretations of his work. But “in a series of crystalline readings,” writes James Wood in the New Yorker, Kronfeld restores the “cultural dangerousness” of Amichai's poetry in this volume.

ALSO OF INTEREST:
The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials
by PAUL CELAN, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Hein Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris

Watchwords »
Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

by LILY GURTON-WACHTER

Drawing on the works of the darlings of British Romanticism—Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith—Watchwords explores the Romantic tradition’s preoccupation with attention, particularly against the backdrop of the great national events that surfaced during this period: war, invasion, surveillance, and general national alarm. Lily Gurton-Wachter contends that the Romantic poets explode the deceptively simple question of what we attend and how we attend by formally managing, deflecting, and distracting the reader’s attention in their own verse. Her account offers a persuasive argument for how the poetics of attention reflect the political debates and technological innovations of the time. “This book,” says Nancy Yousef (author of Romantic Intimacy), “will be important to all Romanticists interested in the dynamic relationship between aesthetic form, affect, and cultural milieu.”

ALSO OF INTEREST:
Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War
by ERIC C. WALKER

Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism
by JOHN BUGG

The Woman Who Read Too Much »

by BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

The Woman Who Read Too Much follows the saga of a nineteenth-century Iranian poetess as she navigates court intrigues, religious orthodoxy, and restrictive gender norms in Qajar Iran. This internationally acclaimed novel, loosely based on the life of poet and theologian Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn and lauded by Kirkus as an “expertly crafted epic,” details an intellectual and social rebellion rooted in the emancipatory power of literacy. Appearing on the page by no other name than simply the Poet, Nakhjvani’s protagonist stirs controversy, challenging prevailing notions around the role of women in society, the issue of education in general, and the literacy of women and girls in particular. She is “one of the most powerfully convincing characters in recent historical fiction,” according to The Guardian, and Nakhjavani’s portrayal of her story is “breathtaking in its scope and wonderfully illuminating.”

ALSO OF INTEREST:
Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran
by ROXANNE VARZI

Souffles-Anfas »
A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics

edited by OLIVIA C. HARRISON and TERESA VILLA-IGNACIO

Souffles, an incendiary poetry and culture review, and its Arabic-language twin, Anfas, were born in (and ultimately dissolved by) the crucible of the decades-long period known in Morocco as the “years of lead.” During a time marked by state violence against dissidents and democracy activists, editor-in-chief Abdellatif Laâbi, described the literary journal’s raison d’être as a means by which to “bear witness to a ‘reality in action’.” The leftist Moroccan writers and poets published in the pages of Souffles and Anfas broke with stagnant French models and Arabic canons in order to forge new artistic forms, all with the aim of crystallizing a distinctly Moroccan national literature untethered to colonial predecessors. The anthology compiled in Souffles-Anfas represents a vast and varied corpus of experimental writing from these lightning-rod publications, while a critical introduction and section headnotes help to further contextualize the collection.

ALSO OF INTEREST:
Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization
by OLIVIA C. HARRISON

Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet »

by JAMES KARMAN

The name of Robinson Jeffers, perhaps once one of the most famous poets in the United States, is today surrounded by a remarkable and surprising silence. In his biography of the poet, James Karman argues that Jeffers’ has been culturally elided, not only owing to his singular aesthetic style (Karman dubs him the “anti-modern Modernist”) but also on account of his critical political vantage point that made him an outlier among his contemporaries. Conveyed in epic form and inflected with classical grandeur and awe for the natural world, his corpus formed a deliberate counterpoint to the clipped colloquial style in vogue with much of the literary milieu. This “elegant review of a truly unique poet” as Booklist described it has garnered awards from the Robinson Jeffers Association and the Book Club of California and “belongs in all American literature collections.”

ALSO OF INTEREST:
The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3
edited by JAMES KARMAN

Homeless Tongues »
Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora

by MONIQUE R. BALBUENA

Homeless Tongues explores the rich landscape of contemporary Sephardic poetry and its distinctively multilingual character. Through three central figures—Algerian Sadia Lévy, Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, and Argentine Juan Gelman, Monique R. Balbuena reveals how their works, and the polyglot poetic tradition from which they stem, connect disparate Sephardi communities and pose a challenge to the largely monolingual Jewish canon. The book—acclaimed by Professor Lazar Fleishman as a “fascinating read for all those interested in Jewish literatures and languages”—makes the case that the many linguistic strands of Sephardic poetry, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and particularly Ladino, affirm the cultural identity and collective history of Jews across the Diaspora.