The Dance: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307263509 ISBN 13: 9780307263506

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2006

Synopsis

A celebration in verse of the silent poetry of dance and the dancer, this anthology features a dizzying range of subjects: Chinese dagger dances and Hindu festival dances, belly dancers and whirling dervishes, high school proms and wedding waltzes, tango, tarantella, flamenco, modern dance, reels and jigs, disco, and ballet. Some of the world’s most famous choreographers and dancers move through the poems gathered here: from Nijinsky and Pavlova to Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, from Isadora Duncan to George Balanchine and Martha Graham, from Bojangles to Baryshnikov.

The work of more than 150 poets—including Shakespeare, Milton, Hafiz, Rumi, Li Po, Rilke, Rimbaud, Lorca, Akhmatova, Whitman, Dickinson, Cummings, Eliot, and Merrill—reflects the grace, the drama, the expressive power, and the sheer joy to be found in dance around the world and through the ages.

About this title

About the Author

Emily Fragos is a poet who lives in New York City. Her first book of poems, Little Savage, won the David Craig Austin Prize from Columbia University. She edited the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet anthology The Great Cat: Poems About Cats.

From Publishers Weekly

In this addition to Knopf's Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, poet Fragos collects poems on the art of dance, from Biblical verses to poems by classical heavyweights (Homer, Milton), modernist icons (Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost), contemporary masters (Frank Bidart, Billy Collins) and a sampling of work from those in between. Fragos organizes the poems by types of dance-ancient dance rituals, ballet, famous dance figures, modern dance-and captures the pervasiveness and variety of dance throughout history, addressing, as Fragos says, "the human urge to move through space and time." Many usual suspects appear here, but the juxtaposition of old and new is this book's strength. Compare Longfellow's "wheels of the dizzying dances / Under the orchard-trees and down the path to the meadows" to Jori Graham's computer-age version of break dancing: "the robot-like succession of joint isolations / that simulate a body's reaction to / electric shock."
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Edition details

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0307263509
• ISBN 13: 9780307263506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Fragos Emily