The Great Wheel: Poems - Softcover

Mariani, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393317021 ISBN 13: 9780393317022

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997

Synopsis

"The Great Wheel offers a pleasure rarely found: the chance to see a powerful intellect reflect on some of the most moving and universal human experiences". ― Boston Book Review

Here, in his fifth book, Paul Mariani uses the trope of the wheel to chart the kinds of losses we all face in living: deaths and separations, lost loves, lost friends, lost happiness. The wheel of fortune, a ferris wheel ridden with a friend now dead, Dante's paradisal wheel, the wheel of the morning sun, by turns call up Hart Crane and Wilfrid Owen, Stevens and Williams, Whitman and Hopkins.

About this title

About the Author:

Poet, scholar, essayist, critic, Paul Mariani is the author of many books, including William Carlos Williams and The Great Wheel. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

From Library Journal:

Perhaps better known for his first-rate critical and biographical studies of such writers as William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins than for his poems, Mariani (Salvage Operations, LJ 8/90) here wrestles viscerally and viciously with the past. With astute hindsight, poems such as "Falling Asleep" and "Duet" capture the haunting premonitions and condensed terror children feel in the face of death and anger. While these poems don't lend themselves to brief quotations, they are outstanding. When he attempts to imbue the more recent past with similar nightmares, he falls short; these poems seem cliched at worst, romantic at best, e.g., "burning with love's deep hungers." His attempts to move away from himself into personified voices whose experience he does not share are technically excellent but leave readers unmoved. Equally disappointing are the poem-letters to such mentors as Irving Howe and Allen Mandelbaum. For larger collections.?Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0393317021
• ISBN 13: 9780393317022
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 76