Hard Bread by Peg Boyers
The poems in Peg Boyers's Hard Bread are spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-91). While much of the book is based on Ginzburg's life her upbringing in Turin; her brief marriage to the resistance activist, Leone Ginzburg; her experience of Fascism and war; her work as novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist; her embattled friendships with writers like Primo Levi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernest Hemingway, and Cesare Pavese much is invented. The result is a book by turns melancholy and acerbic, mournful and satiric, contemplative and combative.
"The sustained originality of Peg Boyers's Hard Bread not only surpasses the notion of a merely good first book, it soars beyond the conventional expectations of 'persona' and 'dramatic monologue' Within a few pages it's clear that this is true poetry, giving voice with unforgettable specificity to the woe, comedy and heroism of a twentieth-century life." - Robert Pinsky; "Hard Bread is easy reading; Peg Boyers has found a means (a measure) of articulating speech, the thought of speech, which sets no barrier or distance between the poem cast on the page and the dramatic figure created in the mind. Her secret is chiefly a matter of versification, for what she has given us is neither criticism nor biography, heroine-worship nor historical idealization; she has written the poetry of another person, an operation requiring the paired gifts of ventriloquist and vampire. The explicit wisdom and the mysterious reticence of 'Natalia Ginzburg' (quite different from Natalia Ginzburg, author of those tough little novels) constitutes, for all Peg Boyers's modesty of address, the most original debut in my experience of contemporary American poetry." - Richard Howard "The Phoenix Poets list contains a number of poets currently on my list of favorites. This is a strong, vital series which has given voice to some of the best voices in American poetry today." - Billy Collins "I am touched throughout by the limpid steadiness with which each poem refuses to be budged a hairsbreadth away from the feeling behind it. As exacting in its respect for etymology as is Dickinson herself, it is one of the very few books I would recommend to someone who wanted to know what the lyric poem can do that no other medium can." - James McMichael
Boyers, Peg: -
Peg Boyers is Executive Editor of Salmagundi Magazine and the author of three previous books of poetry published by the University of Chicago Press: Hard Bread (2002), Honey With Tobacco (2007) and To Forget Venice (2014). She teaches poetry at Skidmore College and at The New York State Summer Writers Institute, and has taught workshops in translation at The Columbia University School of the Arts. Her poems regularly appear in such magazines as The New Republic, Paris Review, Harvard Review and many others. Her recent work includes a series of poems in the journal Liberties and the afterword to the New York Review of Books edition of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226069654 |
| ISBN 10 | 0226069656 |
| Title | Hard Bread |
| Author | Peg Boyers |
| Series | Phoenix Poets |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 2002-04-11 |
| Number of pages | 112 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |