David Ferry

Horace

Provides a new translation of the Odes of Horace who, along with his friend Virgil, was the most celebrated and influential poet of the reign of Emperor Augustus

The Odes of Horace

Provides a new translation of the ancient Babylonian epic poem about a powerful hero who searches for a way to escape death

A New Rendering in English Verse

Gilgamesh

My aim is to take familiar things and make Poetry of them, and do it in such a way That it looks as if it was as easy as could be For anybody to do it . . . the power of making A perfectly wonderful thing out of nothing much. --from "The Art of Poetry" When David Ferry's translation of The Odes of Horace appeared in 1997, Bernard Knox, writing in The New York Review of Books, called it "a Horace for our times." Now Ferry has translated Horace's two books of Epistles, in which Horace perfected the conversational verse medium that gives his voice such dazzling immediacy, speaking in these letters with such directness, wit, and urgency to young writers, to friends, to his patron Maecenas, to Emperor Augustus himself. It is the voice of a free man, talking about how to get along in a Roman world full of temptations, opportunities, and contingencies, and how to do so with one's integrity intact. Horace's world, so unlike our own and yet so like it, comes to life in these poems. And there are also the poems -- the famous "Art of Poetry" and others -- about the tasks and responsibilities of the writer: truth to the demands of one's medium, fearless clear-sighted self-knowledge, and unillusioned, uncynical realism, joyfully recognizing the world for what it is.

Bilingual Edition

The Epistles of Horace

Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry. To read David Ferry’s Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against—and with—his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. From Bewilderment: October The day was hot, and entirely breathless, so The remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fall Seemed as if it had no cause at all. The ticking sound of falling leaves was like The ticking sound of gentle rainfall as They gently fell on leaves already fallen, Or as, when as they passed them in their falling, Now and again it happened that one of them touched One or another leaf as yet not falling, Still clinging to the idea of being summer: As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day, Had read, and understood, the calendar.

New Poems and Translations

Bewilderment

David Ferry's Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations provides a wonderful gathering of the work of one of the great American poetic voices of the twentieth century. It brings together his new poems and translations, collected here for the first time; his books Strangers and Dwelling Places in their entirety; selections from his first book, On the Way to the Island; and selections from his celebrated translations of the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the Odes of Horace, and of Virgil's Eclogues. This is Ferry's fullest and most resonant book, demonstrating the depth and breadth of forty years of a life in poetry. "Though Ferry is perhaps best known for his eloquent translations of Horace and Virgil, "Of No Country I Know" demonstrates that he deserves acclaim for his own poetry as well."—Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times Book Review

New and Selected Poems and Translations

Of No Country I Know

Virgil

A modern translation of the ten inter-related pastoral poems accompany the original Latin text

A Translation

The Eclogues of Virgil

This textbook provides a complete course in quantum mechanics for students of semiconductor device physics and electrical engineering. It provides the necessary background to quantum theory for those starting work on micro- and nanoelectronic structures and is particularly useful for those going on to work with semiconductors and lasers. This book was developed from a course the author has taught for many years with a style and order of presentation of material specifically designed for this audience. It introduces the main concepts of quantum mechanics which are important in everyday solid-state physics and electronics. Each topic includes examples which have been carefully chosen to draw upon relevant experimental research. It also includes problems with solutions to test understanding of theory. For the second edition significant new material has been added to each chapter, providing updated connections with relevant experiments and device concepts. New references and new problems are included.

An Introduction for Device Physicists and Electrical Engineers, Second Edition

Quantum Mechanics

A 5.5 x 8.5" full color paperback of situational cartoons dedicated to all the "Rule Followers" who struggle against the odds, day-by-day coping with the unfair things that life throws at them, observing life from the slow lane, not the passing lane on the "Highway of Life".

Observations of Life from the Slow Lane...

Loose Threads

The Oilfield Years is part two of an Autobiography. Though well seasoned, a young man is forced into the oilfield at age fifteen in the late 1960's. The oilfield was a wild and hard world. It contained mostly good, decent, hard-working people. Accidents were a common staple of the oilfield in the early years and there was simply put, no stability. To make a living in the oilfield, one had to travel and change jobs a lot. You worked with a diversity of people. Cajuns, Arabs, Hondurans, Indonesians and many other nationalities make up the oilfields. Something, comical occurred often and roughnecks in general created mishaps. "The Oilfield Years" deals with work, fights, accidents, blunders and my view of that world for over twenty-five years. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed the people.

The Oilfield Years

Gilgamesh is the great epic of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the oldest works in world literature, contemporary with the oldest parts of the Bible. It is the story of a legendary king who achieves heroic victories with the help of the wild man Enkidu; but when his friend dies, Gilgamesh goes in search of the way to escape death, a secret he can only learn from the one man who survived the Great Flood.David Ferry's new rendering is as lucid and lively as Robert Fitzgerald's Homer and Richmond Lattimore's Virgil, but his is more a transformation than a translation. Ferry's poetry combines faithful attention to the literal meanings of the original with a ﬁne sense for the poetic qualities that make Gilgamesh not only an important docu-ment of ancient Mesopotamia but also a profoundly moving story of the love between companions and the terrible inevitability of death. Gilgamesh is a new masterwork of English poetry, as much Ferry's own as The Vanity of Human Wishes is Johnson's rather than Juvenal's.This edition also includes Ferry's version of the related Babylonian poem, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Nether World, as well as an introduction by William L. Moran, Mellon Professor of Humanities at Harvard University.

The limits of mortality: an essay on Wordsworth's major poems

Carlo Jacoboni

Quantum Transport in Semiconductors

Bank of the Cottonwoods Bank of the Cottonwoods deals with the first eighteen years of my life and the people around me. The book is part one of a two-book autobiography. My version of my life and the people around me is one of many. The paragraphs are long, the theme varies, but I am not a professional author, just a country boy. The greatest lesson that I learned in those first eighteen years have stuck with me. First of all, you can find good in most people, if you dig deep enough. People also can change; you do not have to be a product of your environment. Perhaps the greatest of all the lessons that is portrayed in Bank of the Cottonwoods is that people, in general, are programmed from childhood. Some are programmed to work, steal, be prejudiced, hate, or even think they are better than others. Also that programming can be passed on down, several generations. Perhaps somebody's mom or daddy was wrong and some were right. You can call my book fact or fiction, but to me they are as real as the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, because I lived it.

Bank of the Cottonwoods

Hazel Harrison

Painting Without a Brush

The information revolution would have been radically different, or impossible, without the use of the materials known generically as semiconductors. The properties of these materials, particularly the potential for doping with impurities to create transistors and diodes and controlling the local potential by gates, are essential for microelectronics. Semiconductor Transport is an introductory text on electron transport in semiconductor materials and is written for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. The book provides a thorough treatment of modern approaches to the transport properties of semiconductors and their calculation. It also introduces those aspects of solid state physics, which are vitally important for understanding transport in them.

Semiconductor Transport

On the Way to the Island

"The monologue is like the tip of one of those seasonal icebergs that float so majestically down the Newfoundland coastline. They catch one's breath, but underneath lies the other nine-tenths of the beast, an ice-blue bedrock, glowing as if with an inner light."--from the introduction by David Ferry An anthology of modern Canadian monologues for the male voice, for use in classes and auditions, or for general interest.

Monologues for Men

He Speaks

Hailed as one of the best contemporary poets writing in the English language, David Ferry meditates unsentimentally, in many of these powerful and often wrenching poems, on the dispossession of people afflicted by madness, homelessness, or other forms of "wildness." The voices in all the poems in this book demonstrate how, for each of us, there is no certain dwelling place. "David Ferry's Dwelling Places is a marvelous, extremely moving book, distinguished by Ferry's characteristic formal virtuosity, extraordinarily fresh and 'inner' translations, and a kind of driven anguished rage at both the social conditions in which human beings have to live and the mysteriously unchangeable tragedies of individual human lives. The translations amplify and deepen the contemporary scenes. I feel that in the future this will be perceived as a great book."—Frank Bidart "Not until I had read Dwelling Places several times did I see how ingeniously resourceful, ambitious, and admirably modest a book David Ferry has made."—Boston Review

Poems and Translations

Dwelling Places

An Essay of Wordsworth's Major Poems

The Limits of Mortality

David Ferry is one of the most eminent poets writing in the US today. In 'On This Side of the River', Ferry presents a large sampling of his work, both as an original poet and as a translator.

David Ferry

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