Description
In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, Peter O'Leary offers a new reading of modern and contemporary poets' treatment of religion and the nature of the divine in a secular age. The book seeks to come to terms with an often obscured spiritual impulse that drives the production and imagination of American poetry. O'Leary presents close and comprehensive readings of the modernist, late-modernist, and postmodern poets Robinson Jeffers, Frank Samperi, and Robert Duncan, as well as the contemporary poets Joseph Donahue, Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Pam Rehm, and Lissa Wolsak. He argues that an anxiety of misunderstanding exists in the study and writing of poetry between secular and religious impulses and that the religious nature of poets' works is too often marginalized. Examining the works of a specific poet in each chapter, O'Leary reveals their complexity and offers a defense of the value and meaning of religious poetry against the grain of a secular society.
About the Author
Peter O'Leary is the author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness (2002), as well as several books of poetry, most recently The Sampo (2016), and the editor of a new edition of Ronald Johnson's ARK (2014). He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
Reviews
Thick and Dazzling Darkness undertakes the daunting task of exploring spirituality (qua poetry) in a way that connects such otherwise dissimilar poets as the self-consciously backward-looking Robinson Jeffers, the peculiarly American modernism of Robert Duncan, and the (at)tendent postmodernism of Fanny Howe and Nathaniel Mackey. O'Leary creates a conceptual fabric through which we can "read" this diverse group of poets-some well-served in scholarly circles, others rapidly falling off the American poetry radar. Given our cultural predicament as Americans, this work could not be more timely. -- G. C. Waldrep, Bucknell University
Book Information
ISBN 9780231173308
Author Peter O'Leary
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
About the Author
Peter O'Leary is the author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness (2002), as well as several books of poetry, most recently The Sampo (2016), and the editor of a new edition of Ronald Johnson's ARK (2014). He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.
Reviews
Thick and Dazzling Darkness undertakes the daunting task of exploring spirituality (qua poetry) in a way that connects such otherwise dissimilar poets as the self-consciously backward-looking Robinson Jeffers, the peculiarly American modernism of Robert Duncan, and the (at)tendent postmodernism of Fanny Howe and Nathaniel Mackey. O'Leary creates a conceptual fabric through which we can "read" this diverse group of poets-some well-served in scholarly circles, others rapidly falling off the American poetry radar. Given our cultural predicament as Americans, this work could not be more timely. -- G. C. Waldrep, Bucknell University
Book Information
ISBN 9780231173308
Author Peter O'Leary
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
