Rosanna Warren

Eugenio Montale

William Arrowsmith

A collection of poems in Italian and English by the 1975 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature reveals an innovative use of dialogue, journalistic language, song, and other techniques. Reprint.

1962-1970

Satura

A Life in Art and Letters

Max Jacob

Fables of the Self traces ideas of imagined selfhood through the lyric poetry of classical Greece and Rome, the modernist poetry of France, and modern and contemporary English and American lyrics. Rosanna Warren's work emerges from the tradition of British and American poet-critics such as William Empson, Donald Davie, and Randall Jarrell. Her readings of Sappho, Virgil, Baudelaire, Melville, Rimbaud, Mark Strand, and Louise Glück, among others, combine Helen Vendler's passionate attention to detail and something of Harold Bloom's panoramic view. Warren opposes both the literalizing, autobiographical approach to self in so-called confessional poetry and the other extreme of avant-garde erasures of self. Framing her critical studies between a memoir of childhood and a concluding journal entry, Warren has composed an occult autobiography, showing the imagination as a transfiguring and potentially moral force.

Studies in Lyric Poetry

Fables of the Self

An English-language translation of works by the late Nobel Prize winner offers insight into his role in influencing Italian poetry and international Modernism, as well as his views on such topics as modernity, fascism, and war.

The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale 1925-1977

“Achieves a delicate balance between structural solidity and movement. . . . Warren’s latest poems tend to veil their complexity in understatement.”—Harvard Review In her fifth collection, Rosanna Warren draws inspiration not only from her own life but also from the works of other artists, both classical and contemporary, real and imagined. Warren explores the political and the personal through myth, history, elegy, and erotic lyric. She eulogizes her mother in poems such as “Mediterranean,” where she writes, “the mystery was / not that she walked there, ten years after her death, / / but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place—.” In other poems, Warren contemplates wreckage and sorrow in family life, in Hurricane Katrina, and in the Trojan War, but also moments of eerie blessing. In her most forceful collection to date, she obsessively traces themes, both ancient and modern, in a voice compelling and deeply persuasive. from "Mediterranean" There was something I wanted to say, at the age of twelve, some question she hadn't answered, and yesterday, so clearly seeing her pace before me it rose again to the tip of my tongue, and the mystery was not that she walked there, ten years after her death, but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place—

Poems

Ghost in a Red Hat

Robert Atwan

A beautiful gift book that captures autumn in all its contemplative beautyThe Heart of Autumn collects some thirty masterful poems by English-language writers on the experience of reflection and introspection that occurs with the fading of the sunlight, the cooling of the earth, and the dropping of the leaves. Illustrated throughout with graceful pen-and-ink drawings of fall foliage, this volume features a selection of some of the world's most acclaimed poets from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and William Wordsowrth to comtemporary poets including e.e. cummins, Robert Bly, and W.S. Merwin. Each poem offers readers a glimpse of the satisfying gifts that fall brings to us, and a celebration of the hallmarks of the season: the harvest, Thanksgiving, and finally, the onset of winter. The title of the book is taken from a Robert Penn Warren poem, and the introduction is a meditation on the season by his daughter, the poet Rosanna Warren. Other contributors include: Archibald MacLeish, May Sarton, Pamela Steed Hill, Yvor Winters, Edgar Lee Masters, John Keats, Mary Jo Salter, Siegfried Sassoon, Richard Wilbur, Louise Bogan, Carl Sandburg, William Butler Yeats, and more.

Poems for the Season of Reflection

The Heart of Autumn

A comprehensive and moving biography of Max Jacob, a brilliant cubist poet who lived at the margins of fame. Though less of a household name than his contemporaries in early twentieth century Paris, Jewish homosexual poet Max Jacob was Pablo Picasso’s initiator into French culture, Guillaume Apollinaire’s guide out of the haze of symbolism, and Jean Cocteau’s loyal friend. As Picasso reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry with compressed, hard-edged prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics, the product of a complex amalgamation of Jewish, Breton, Parisian, and Roman Catholic influences. In Max Jacob, the poet’s life plays out against the vivid backdrop of bohemian Paris from the turn of the twentieth century through the divisions of World War II. Acclaimed poet Rosanna Warren transports us to Picasso’s ramshackle studio in Montmartre, where Cubism was born; introduces the artists gathered at a seedy bar on the left bank, where Max would often hold court; and offers a front-row seat to the artistic squabbles that shaped the Modernist movement. Jacob’s complex understanding of faith, art, and sexuality animates this sweeping work. In 1909, he saw a vision of Christ in his shabby room in Montmartre, and in 1915 he converted formally from Judaism to Catholicism—with Picasso as his godfather. In his later years, Jacob split his time between Paris and the monastery of Benoît-sur-Loire. In February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, where he would die a few days later. More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.

Rosanna Warren

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