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New and Selected Poems
American Poets Project
Library of America
October 2005
On Sale: October 5, 2005
200 pages ISBN: 1931082855 EAN: 9781931082853 Hardcover
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Fiction Poetry
Samuel Menashe is the first recipient of the Neglected
Masters Prize established by The Poetry Foundation, and this
volume is published in conjunction with that award. Born in
New York City in 1925, Menashe has practiced his art of
"compression and crystallization" (in Derek Mahon's phrase)
in poems that are brief in form but startlingly wide-ranging
and profound in their engagement with ultimate questions.
Dana Gioia has written: "Menashe is essentially a religious
poet, though one without an orthodox creed. Nearly every
poem he has ever published radiates a heightened religious
awareness." Intensely musical and rigorously constructed,
Menashe's poetry stands apart in its solitary meditative
power. But it is equally a poetry of the everyday, suffused,
in the words of Christopher Ricks, with "the courage of
comedy, flanked by the respect of innocence." The humblest
of objects, the minutest of natural forms here become
powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems
are spacious in the perspectives they open.
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