Maximum Security Ward 1964-1970 - Softcover

Guthrie, Ramon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374204683 ISBN 13: 9780374204686

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970

Synopsis

`There can be no doubt of its cumulative power, its frequent brilliance. It is a major work within the span of recent years.' Wall Street Journal `Ramon Guthrie is a magnificent American poet in his seventies who has been overlooked . . . it is a deeply, heartbreakingly American book whose importance will become clearer and clearer as time passes.' The New York Times Book Review MOST of this extraordinary book was written while Ramon Guthrie was, as he thought, dying of cancer. The doctors gave him only a few weeks to live, but a month and fifty-seven transfusions later he was sent home, and soon after the American Institute of Arts and Letters presented him with an award. In this strange setting of the Intensive Care Ward he writes of the imprisonments, interrogations, torments, the gaolers and inquisitors, orderlies, nurses, doctors who take his ebbing life relentlessly in charge in what is a totalitarian regimen for all its affirmed benevolence. Throughout Guthrie maintains a bawdy, gusty, death-defying graveyard humour, with no illusions and no sentimentality. This masterly new book, in its energy, architecture, and probing of the human agony, is the crowning work of the long and distinguished career of this major poet/ RAMON GUTHRIE, a member of the French and Comparative Literature faculty at Dartmouth for many years, recently won the Marjorie Peabody Waite award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1970
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374204683
• ISBN 13: 9780374204686
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 143