World Beat: International Poetry Now From New Directions (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

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9780811216517: World Beat: International Poetry Now From New Directions (New Directions Paperbook)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811216519 ISBN 13: 9780811216517

Publisher: New Directions, 2006

A celebration of contemporary poetry from around the world, World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions is a treasure trove that will satisfy and fascinate poetry lovers.

A mosaic of twenty-eight foreign and American poets, World Beat is an extraordinary compilation, unlike any other anthology, of the poetry being written today. For some seventy years, New Directions Publishing has brought literary America the world, introducing many of the world's most important, and at the time usually unknown, writers. Today, with a diminishing earth and an increasingly isolated United States, dialogue among the nations is desperately needed. On the poetic front, this dialogue assumes a particular potency and urgency. In World Beat, expertly edited by the remarkable writer and translator Eliot Weinberger, a new generation of New Directions poets from across the globe mingles in a euphonic cross-cultural chorus.

The collection opens with the last poem by Octavio Paz, a major work previously unpublished in book form, and then tracks through the writings of foreign and American poets that New Directions has published in recent years. From the haunting erotic lyrics of the young Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku, to the powerful political insights of exiled Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail, Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, and Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite, to the lapidary beauty of Dutch poet Hans Faverey and the wild experiments of Chinese poet Gu Cheng and Japanese poet Kazuko Shiraishi, to Nobel Prize shortlisters Bei Dao of China, Inger Christensen of Denmark, Gennady Aygi of Chuvashia, and Tomas Transtromer of Swedenhere is a planetary greatest hits that also includes work by Canadian Anne Carson and a range of American poets (Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Robert Creeley among them), whose works take on new resonances when read alongside their world-peers.

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About the Author:

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, editor, and translator. He lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

Essayist and translator Weinberger has culled this sampler of 24 international poets mostly from the pages of their New Directions books. Recent American poets like Forest Gander, Rosmarie Waldrop and Susan Howe collide with poets from around the world, such as Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz and Swedish heavyweight Tomas Transtr�mer. By turns philosophical-"To enter the real, / how far / must we feel beyond / the world in which we already are?" (Charles Tomlinson)-ironic-"I do not know English, and therefore I can have nothing to say about this latest war" (Michael Palmer)-and direct-"I thank everyone I don't love. / They don't cause me heartache" (Dunya Mikhail)-this anthology is less a catalogue of cultural differences than an inquiry into the universal sources of perception and imagination. Anne Carson's self-referential and unknowable God, for whom "God's own calmness is a sign of God" meets Gu Cheng's God "who lets you cherish the sand, pockets, and the children." This anthology impressively represents the ways New Directions has blurred the boundaries between one poet's-and perhaps one nation's- concerns and those of another, offering a fresh look at the international poetry scene.
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