Braided River by Anselm Hollo

Braided River by Anselm Hollo

Braided River is a selection from forty years of published poems plus some of my most recent, uncollected work. It describes a lifetime's endeavours to write poems that reflect a thinking and feeling person's twentieth century existence in Europe and America - in love and sorrow, and even, still, some hope for the future of the world at large.

Anselm Hollo wrote The Empress Hotel Poems (there were six of them), which appeared in Jon Silkin’s magazine, Stand, in England, in 1966I was astounded by them then, for they proposed, for the first time in my experience, that it was possible for an American poetic idiom to be adopted by a European (writing in English). It is impossible for someone under 40 (say) writing poetry in America today to imagine the narrowness of possibility allowed by the literary climate in England at that time. There were some British poets (Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood being the outstanding examples) who had the nous to overcome those severe limits, but for me, and I’m sure for many others, it was Anselm Hollo’s work that represented a crucial breakthrough, especially because Stand was a magazine with a relatively large distribution, while Raworth and Harwood were still “underground” poets at that time. What The Empress Hotel Poems illuminated was the simple fact that Kerouac, Ginsberg, O’Hara and company, were not simply icons of a seemingly fabulous culture beyond our reach, but were potential models for the future of a new poetics.

-- Doug Lang * Washington Review *

On Corvus: The bedrock solidness of Anselm Hollo’s poems makes as ever a place of refuge and delight in these meager times. Thank God for his humor, else we’d all be dead.

-- Robert Creeley

On Corvus: For three decades Anselm Hollo has been an important figure on the intercultural poetry scene. In Outlying Districts, we see how his original work has been enriched, both technically and in content, by the contact he has had with European poets through his impressive translations.

-- James Laughlin

And the language – hip and jazzy, humorous, erudite and seemingly casual, overlays the serious rumblings of a non-complacent mind, always ‘very there’, wary and alert. Resonating from the onset of the moment, his poems are sharp, concise, politically prescient, and a bit world weary – as should be expected – with his awareness of and translations from an international and intercultural world of writing. Although he has made the United States his home since 1966, he still retains the valuable ability to see ‘America’ from the outside. Yet he knows that “beauty knows no ideologically correct routines.”

-- Joanne Kyger * San Francisco Poetry Center Prize *

Anselm Hollo was the author of more than thirty books, not including his literary translations. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into Finnish, French, German, Swedish, and Hungarian. He received a NEA Fellowship, two grants from The Fund for Poetry, the Government of Finland’s Distinguished Foreign Translator’s Award, The San Francisco Poetry Center’s Book Award, and The Academy of American Poets’ Translation Prize. He taught at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He died in 2013.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781844711093
ISBN 10	1844711099
Title	Braided River
Author	Anselm Hollo
Series	Salt Modern Poets
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Salt Publishing
Year published	2005-03-01
Number of pages	260
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.