Literary Poetry

Barrier of a Common Language by Dana Gioia

Orientations by Ezra Pound

Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry

Dana Gioia

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

In Barrier of a Common Language, Dana Gioia collects essays on British poets and poetry spanning the past two decades.

Gioia ignited a national debate on the relevance of poetry in 1991 when he published an essay in the Atlantic titled Can Poetry Matter? The essay was expanded into a book of the same name and went on to become one of the best-selling books of contemporary poetry criticism in the 1990s.

In Barrier of a Common Language Gioia addresses the current disconnect between British and American poetry, the result of America's growing post-war self-sufficiency in its intellectual concerns and concomitant patronizing attitude toward Britain. Writes Gioia, "Today...most American readers are not only unfamiliar with current British poetry, but modestly proud of the fact. They do not dissemble, but urbanely flourish their ignorance as an indisputable sign of discrimination."

Whether British poetry ever regains the importance in Anglo-American literary traditions it had fifty years ago, says Gioia, "will depend on the quality of service it receives from critics, poets, editors, and anthologists who alone can make it accurately heard and understood."

Poet, critic, and acclaimed author of Can Poetry Matter?, Dana Gioia is one of America's leading contemporary men of letters. Winner of the American Book Award, Gioia is internationally recognized for his role in reviving rhyme, meter, and narrative in contemporary poetry.

October 2003
108 pages

Orientations: The Essays from Il Meridiano di Roma

Ezra Pound
translated by Peter Nicholls & Elena Gualtieri

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

During the poet Ezra Pound's long exile in Italy throughout the 1920s and 30s, he became a staunch supporter of Italy's repressive regime under Mussolini and a frequent contributor to the Italian periodical Il Meridiano di Roma. This ambitious volume collects for the first time in English these intensely idealistic pieces that supported Mussolini's fascist politics and that culminated in Pound's eventual conviction and incarceration. The insightful commentary by British scholars Peter Nicholls and Elena Gualtieri place the essays in context and provide essential insights into Ezra Pound's life and work, and particularly the evolution of ideas found in the Cantos. Orientations is a crucial addition to the literary and historical record on Pound, and a must-have for scholars and students of modernist literary studies.

Peter Nicholls is Professor of English and American Literature, University of Sussex; Elena Gualtieri is Lecturer in English, University of Sussex.

Fall 2006