Beckmann Variations and Other Poems by Michael Heller
Ekphrasis, that ancient mode found in Homer's description of Achilles' shield or Keats' Grecian Urn, is here transformed in Michael Heller's meditations in poetry and prose on work by the painter Max Beckmann. Heller navigates, sometimes with Yeats as his Virgil, through a gallery of Beckmann's pictures, seeing them as uniquely bringing home contemporary civilization's catastrophic impulses ('as if days were not for sanity'), impulses at once horrific and unsettling yet strangely beautiful and restorative.
Heller, Michael: - Michael Heller's poems first appeared in print in the nineteen-sixties while he was living in a small village on Spain's Andalusian coast, a period he describes in his book, EARTH AND CAVE (Dos Madres Press, 2006). In 1967, he returned to the U.S, taking a teaching position at New York University. Since then, he has published over twenty-five volumes of poetry, essays, memoir and fiction. Among his most recent works are CONSTELLATIONS OF WAKING (2019), DIANOIA (2016), THIS CONSTELLATION IS A NAME: COLLECTED POEMS 1965-2010 (2012), and SPEAKING THE ESTRANGED: ESSAYS ON THE WORK OF GEORGE OPPEN (2012). Since the nineteen-nineties, he has been collaborating with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson on multimedia works including writing the libretto for the opera, CONSTELLATIONS OF WAKING, which premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2000. Among his many awards are grants and prizes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America and The Fund for Poetry. A collection of critical essays on his work, The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2015. A frequent traveler to Europe, he resides in New York City and spends his summers in the Colorado mountains. He is married to the poet and scholar Jane Augustine.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781848610873 |
| ISBN 10 | 1848610874 |
| Title | Beckmann Variations and Other Poems |
| Author | Michael Heller |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Shearsman Books |
| Year published | 2010-03-15 |
| Number of pages | 80 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |