The Whole Nine Yards presents a compelling collection of poems by former Poet Laureate and two-time National Book Award finalist Daniel Hoffman, each poem aiming to share the pleasures of dramatizing language, theme and form.
“A major work, a record of our era,” wrote Maxine Kumin in awarding the Paterson Poetry Prize to Hang-Gliding from Helicon, Daniel Hoffman’s selected poems a dozen years ago. Of Darkening Water, his first collection since then, Fred Chappell observes, “These poems have all the poet’s familiar virtues—clarity, grace where desired, accuracy of visual detail and of dialogue, and a formal mastery so deft that playfulness comes easily. Hoffman’s dominant theme lies in the contrast (and often the necessary balance) between the primal, ancient, legendary strains of our culture and the new-fangled, distracting but genuine imperatives of contemporaneity. Hoffman uses older forms and traditions to make something new and durable.” The range of Hoffman’s sensibility includes the primordial sludge from which life emerged and the coin-filled fountain of a suburban shopping mall, an enduring New England garden and the dancing woman in an ancient cave. His luminous poems create memorable characters, exploring man’s relationship to nature and to time. Seemingly effortless juxtapositions create rewarding surprises. This refined collection by one of our finest poets reverberates with intelligence, close observation, and a deep respect for the possibilities of language. It is a treasure for Hoffman’s many longtime readers as well as for those discovering his work for the first time.
For sixty years Daniel Hoffman has drawn on a lifetime of experiences to engage readers with his powerful imagination. The poems in Next to Last Words -- illuminated by the poet's unique vision and leavened by touches of humor -- continue this tradition. Equally skilled in formal and free verse, Hoffman explores our place in the cosmos, our kinship with nature, the violent world in which we must live, and the intense love and grief common to everyone's life.
A chance summer job while in college led, after a few weeks, to Hoffman's writing instruction manuals for the P-47C and B-17F. Called up in the Enlisted Reserve, he was sent to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. At twenty, he was given more responsibility than he has ever held since: directing the AAF Technical Data Digest, an abstracts journal that covered every phase of aeronautical research and development relevant to the Army Air Force.
Ten critics describe and assess the work of American novelists, playwrights, and poets writing in the United States from the end of World War II to the end of the 1970's.
Across a city a harried doctor makes his rounds: A dying child. A fatal streetcar accident. A stillborn delivery. A house-call to a mansion where, beneath an evocative painting of Susanna and the Elders, a former lord of the financial district broods upon his vanished power and awaits death in the company of his mercenary butler. Thus begins Middens of the Tribe, part family saga, part naturalistic novella. As the relationships between the characters reveal themselves, what emerges is a Tarot of the unfulfilled. The frustrated artist. His lover, who posed as Susanna. A roughneck roundhouse worker. Wilma, whose identity is one of the book's most disturbing secrets. The tongue-tied office boy. The illusionist Doctor Magic and his long-suffering assistant. The tycoon. His scathingly self-deluded wife. Their children, a mysteriously estranged daughter and two sons, one following, however falteringly, in his father's footsteps, the other an archaeologist searching through the detritus of ancient lives for clues to the mysteries of his own: Can the middens of the tribe I study tell if family strife always reveals a culture's dynamics, if, amid bones, flints, sufferings are the same? Memories, nightmares, reveries intersect in Middens of the Tribe, unveiling a stark, four-dimensional nexus of lives intertwined -- leavened by touches of the comic and grotesque: a cubist rendering of alienation, intimacy, and loss. Daniel Hoffman's accomplishment is an ambitious one. For both narrative power and poetic intensity, Middens of the Tribe is an unforgettable book.
Accepting an award for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Daniel Hoffman wrote, "Amid private sufferings and outrage at the brutalities of public life, it is gaiety that sustains us, and love, and the imagination's power to create from both deprivation and delight." This collection embodies those emotions and that imaginative power. Hoffman's verse has always exulted in the resources of language, as sensuous in sound as in response to the natural world. Beyond Silence, to be published on Hoffman's eightieth birthday, presents his shorter poems culled from eight previous collections, plus several new poems. Here, rather than in chronological order, they appear thematically and invite the reader to partake of the pleasures that characterize this distinguished poet's verse: "clarity, grace where desired, accuracy of visual detail and dialogue, and a formal mastery so deft that playfulness comes easily" (Fred Chappell). Arriving at last. It has stumbled across the harshStones, the black marshes. True to itself, by what craftAnd strength it has, it has comeAs a sole survivor returns. From the steep pass.Carved on memory's staffThe legend is nearly decipherable.It has lived up to its vowsIf it enduresThe journey through the dark placesTo bear witness,Casting is messageIn a sort of singing. -- "The Poem
Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his perceptive readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form our national consciousness. In his new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.
Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe is the exploration by a distinguished American poet and critic of his own lifelong fascination with the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Examining Poe’s achievement as poet, as aesthetician, as inventor of the modern detective and science fiction genres, and as master of the psychological tale of terror, Hoffman revels in his subject. The result is a comprehensive, arresting interpretation of the oeuvre and a compassionate, personal portrait of its creator.
Daniel Hoffman’s bold new readings reveal unsuspected dimensions in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. He shows how these works, often regarded as disunified collections of short stories and novellas, are coherent and successful experiments in novelistic form. These last three novels of Faulkner’s great period are striated with folklore and structured with myths. They teem with folk motifs of comic exaggeration, deception, horse-trading, tall-tale humor. Hitherto, critics unversed in folklore have been able to treat these aspects only in generalities. Here, drawing on fieldwork from the Mississippi Writers Project in the 1930s, the author of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe and the influential Form and Fable in America Fiction demonstrates in detail Faulkner’s ironical, subversive, and transformative appropriations of folklore plots, characters, comedy, language, and the style of oral tale-telling, setting these in the full complexity of the works they animate. Hoffman, shows, too how in imagining his dynastic novels, Faulkner interprets myth as history, history as myth. He challenges recent deconstructive, post-Marxist and structuralist readings of “The Bear,” and demonstrates the necessity on the reader’s part for an historical imagination to complement Faulkner’s own. Written with verve, Faulkner’s Country Matters enriches our reading of Faulkner by presenting his work in its necessary settings of southern history and culture. Faulkner’s modernism is restated as a continuance of the great American fiction tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain.
This book offers compelling evidence that the true Church of Jesus is not of this world (John 18:36). The writers have collected a convincing body of factual information (using both biblical as well as secular references) that clearly reveals the true nature of God's kingdom in the earth. Never before has the gospel been made clearer! Have you ever thought about what you believe and why you believe it? Have you ever wondered if organized religion is the way to get to heaven? Do you know that there are over twenty-five thousand different Christian denominations? Is it possible to grow in the Lord without attending church? Do you desire a personal relationship with Jesus Christ? Do you want to know who the antichrist is? If you want to know what the Bible says concerning these things, you must read this book. Find Jesus Christ for yourselves and learn to follow him!
This volume explores the relationship between religion and politics. It brings a varied sample of richly detailed comparative and case studies together with a set of analytical paradigms in an integrated framework. It is a major statement on a timely subject, and a plea for the acknowledgment of normative pluralism as firmly rooted in the history of religion. The editor shows that the fact of political diversity in the history of world religions compels the acceptance of pluralism as a normative principle.
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