Ostriker, Alicia

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What immortal hand or eye ?
Sui Generis
the little lamb has no idea

The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)
William Blake
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140422153

Customer Reviews:

What immortal hand or eye ?.......2005-11-07

It is the shorter poetry of Blake, that of the 'Songs of Innocence' and 'The Songs of Experience' that lives for me, and I suspect for most others. Though Northrop Frye the master literary critic saw in Blake's longer poems a key to reading the whole universe of Literature, I strongly suspect those long- lined abstraction filled 'visions'are outside the interest and staying power of most readers.
Blake was one of the great aphoristic poets, and along with the mystical visionary lines, there came lines like lightning sudden flashes of the mind which strike us strongly and remain with us.
Here is one of the most well- known Blakean lyrics
:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

Blake was the lunatic lover one of the great madmen of poetry who according to his wife gave her little time as he most of the time was 'in Paradise'.
Each reader will going through the Collected Poems stop and select what they find congenial for themselves.
In the Collected Poems of Blake there is very much to stop for, including many of the most memorable lyrics and lines Poetry in English has given the world.

" Little Lamb who made thee, Dost thou know who made thee?"

"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?/

Sui Generis.......2000-08-06

I don't know upon what planet this poet was born, but it certainly wasn't earth. Blake is the ultimate Gnostic, the ascendent correspondent, the bringer of truth from regions we have no knowledge of. The core of his philosophy can be summed up in his assertion in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:" Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast...Isaiah answer'd. I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God."

Blake is the poet of true revolution, true Romanticism and true spirit. This is the definitive volume of his life-work, without, it is true, the illustrations that augmented his genius. Yet there is no real necessity for etchings here, as the genius of his poetry will etch its own image in your mind if you are receptive to his universal symbolism. Blake was the first truly modern poet, prefiguring Mallarme, D.H. Lawrence, Baudelaire, in particular. He was also a great mythologyzer, the precursor of Campbell, Frazier, and even Alan Watts in many respects. The Penguin Edition is not illustrated, it's true, but there is so much to be mined here that one can easily lose oneself in the labyrinth of Blake's excavations.

Recommended without reservations. A truly paradigm shifting poet and artist. Seek out his illustrative, divinely inspired watercolors, as well. A true visionary, if there ever was one!!
BEK

the little lamb has no idea.......2000-04-29

blake's poems are not black ink on these newsprint pages...blake's poems are engraved plates wild and colorful...

but it's fantastic anyway blake is not The Lamb and not The Tyger

tirzah los orc urizen enitharmon vala rahab urthona, all divided and united in the cruelties of holiness...jerusalem the four zoas the book of urizen the song of los...echoing our cries.

The Defiant Muse
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An important work, spanning biblical to contemporary poets

The Defiant Muse

Manufacturer: Loki Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 095294264X

Customer Reviews:

An important work, spanning biblical to contemporary poets.......1999-11-06

This is an impressive collection of known works and newly discovered feminist pieces in their original Hebrew and in stunning translations. Biblical and rabbinic literature is culled for feminist voices; midieval literature from around the world is mined; 20th century Hebrew poets, including a good number of current writers, are represented. There are many poems that you'd expect to find in a collection like this, and many that will be new to you. Bravo to the editors, themselves poets and translators, for this landmark contribution to Hebrew feminist literature.

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Poetry in the Moment and After
Another Achievement from an Essential American Poet
Everything Poetry Should Be

No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series)
Alicia Ostriker
Manufacturer: University of Pittsburgh Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Volcano Sequence (Pitt Poetry Series)
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At the White Window

ASIN: 0822958759

Book Description

Alicia Suskin Ostriker's voice has long been acknowledged as a major force in American poetry. In No Heaven, her eleventh collection, she takes a hint from John Lennon's "Imagine" to wrestle with the world as it is: "no hell below us, / above us only sky."
It is a world of cities, including New York, London, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where the poet can celebrate pickup basketball, peace marches, and the energy of graffiti. It is also a world of families, generations coming and going, of love, love affairs, and friendship. Then it is a world full of art and music, of Rembrandt and Bonnard, Mozart and Brahms. Finally, it is a world haunted by violence and war. No Heaven rises to a climax with elegies for Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by an Israeli zealot, and for the poet's mother, whose death is experienced in the context of a post-9/11 impulse to destroy that seems to seduce whole nations.
Yet Ostriker's ultimate stance is to "Try to praise the mutilated world," as the poet Adam Zagajewski has counseled. At times lyric, at times satiric, Ostriker steadfastly pursuesin No Heaven her poetics of ardor, a passion for the here and now that has chastened and consoled her many devoted readers.

Customer Reviews:

Poetry in the Moment and After.......2007-02-04

(Alicia Ostriker read at the West Side YMCA on Friday, February 2, 2007 as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Authors Series. This is from my introduction to the event).

Reading Alicia Suskin Ostriker's poems in No Heaven is like having someone who needs to impart something essential to you leaning in, quietly and yet with great intensity, showing you something of utmost importance, never lecturing, never condescending, the unearthing of vital information seeming to occur in the moment of telling, so when, the payoffs in the poems themselves take place, in the burst of the revealed moment, the impact is intense and profound.

The ease of the language, its casualness and conversationality might make one overlook to care with which the language here is wrought.

Alicia shows relationships as clearly the commingling of two distinct entities; whether we completely understand the person we're with or not, these poem's simple conversations mirror the familiarity of those long together, whether lover, family member or dear friend. There's that easy connection, yet always so fragile, knowing that we must make ready to part from all we love and hold dear, and yet how we must always stay in the moment, so that what we have will not become subsumed by what we have lost, or will lose. She writes, in the poem "Mid-February":

"Friend, it's a day for a walk
are we going to walk it?"

...and that becomes the challenge of these poems, to have us not waste the day, not take for granted that the beauty and pain and joy and sorrow will continue ever on.

Another Achievement from an Essential American Poet.......2005-08-29

Alicia Ostriker is a quintessential American poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser. NO HEAVEN is the follow-up to Ostriker's brilliant VOLCANO SEQUENCE (lamentably left off the Pulitzer, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award lists)--and here once again we find Ostriker writing poems about real people, crucial human experience and the spiritual essence that runs through everything. NO HEAVEN is a brilliant collection that is hard hitting ("Liking It," "Tearing the Poem Up and Eating It," "Elegy before the War,"), tender ("Brooklyn Twilight," "In the Forty-Fifth Year of Marriage"), and humorous ("When we leap, we hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap" from "Pickup," ". . .when/that brilliant Jew poet took/The train for the next world/American nirvana/Temporarily went with him" from "Elegy for Allen.") NO HEAVEN contains crucial poems for our misguided times from one of America's (or should I say the world's?) best, bravest, and most eloquent poets.

Everything Poetry Should Be.......2005-06-23

No Heaven is a terrific book-- just what poetry should be: at once moving, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and new because it opens heart and mind again. Death is always present as real, heightening consciousness. Every poem contains "a piercing glance into the life of things," as Marianne Moore said, a unity of soul and form. Ostriker reveals the horror and sacredness of everyday life by constantly reinventing the words believed to be ordinary, here transformed. Buy this beautiful collection and find yourself in no heaven but on incandescent eternal ephemeral earth -- the place to be human.

Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America

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Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America
Alicia Ostriker
Manufacturer: Beacon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Criticism | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0807063037

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William Blake: The Complete Poems
William, And Alicia Ostriker, Blake
Manufacturer: Viking Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000KCUWP6

The Volcano Sequence (Pitt Poetry Series)

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A gorgeous exhalation
An original, visionary new book
Written with a truly literate and skilled economy of words

The Volcano Sequence (Pitt Poetry Series)
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Manufacturer: University of Pittsburgh Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0822957841

Customer Reviews:

A gorgeous exhalation.......2003-05-25

With eager breath, Ostriker's collection of poetry comes to life with much to convey. These sensuous poems weave a breath-taking tapestry about the feminine and the holy surrounding us in our lives, often hidden but just beneath the surface. Her knowledge of the Old Testament is clear here, and it more than enhances these poems. It gives them an added grace and strength. These poems are almost like a discussion with holy aspects of the universe, grappling toward a glorious knowing. The energy and imagery brought to mind Anita Diamant's "The Red Tent" and other feminist works, and "The Volcano Sequence" inspires just as strongly.

An original, visionary new book.......2002-07-22

This is an extraordinary new book from one of America's best poets, full of powerful imagination, formal inventiveness, tireless curiosity, and profound challenges to the spirit and social arrangements of our time. Extending traditions of modernist and postmodernist long poems, The Volcano Sequence is a 119-page poem in 9 major sections plus a coda, written in a variety of poetic styles and voices ranging from lyrical meditations to provocative interrogations--of the gods, the universe, our politicians and philosophers, and our literary traditions. One of Alicia Ostriker's great strengths is her ability to write poetry that is simultaneously accessible, intellectually ocean-deep, and filled with a page-turning emotional grip. The Volcano Sequence's poetic explorations interweave an array of spiritual, psychological, and social themes. In one of the central images of the book, Ostriker takes on the role of a feminist midwife trying to use her imaginative powers to re-birth female energies that have historically been devoured by patriarchal conventions. Like lava in a volcano, long-repressed liberating energies can eventually find a way to get out and reshape our world--"sometimes the stories take you and fling you against a wall / sometimes you go right through the wall"(119). Almost every page of this new book is filled with memorable lines, the kind of poetry that makes your spine sit up and take notice, that makes you see the world from new, amazing angles.

Written with a truly literate and skilled economy of words.......2002-03-13

The poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker is complex, original, and written with a truly literate and skilled economy of words. The Volcano Sequence is a compilation of verse that fully showcases Ostriker a master poet in the full vigor of her imagination and wordsmithing talent. Learn To Recognize The Gestures: when her hands cup her breasts/she enjoys her sweet strength/sap ascends the oak//dancing she causes/the young to dance/and to kiss//she may carry a weapon/a knife a gun a razor/she may wear a belt of skulls//when she discharges her anger in laughter/white lightning illuminates the horizon/from pole to pole//often she lays her hand over her eyes/like a secretary leaving/an office building at evening//cradling that infant boy/sitting him on her lap/smoothing the folds of her dress: this means pity//arms crossed: this signifies judgment.

The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 (Pitt Poetry Series)

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The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998 (Pitt Poetry Series)
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Manufacturer: University of Pittsburgh Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Nervous Conditions
Wit : A Play
The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions
No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series)
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

ASIN: 0822956802

Amazon.com

"Like one of those trees with a major limb lopped, / I'm a shade more sublime today than yesterday," Alicia Ostriker writes in "Normal," one of several fine mastectomy poems collected in The Little Space. A poet of consummate physicality, Ostriker wraps her philosophical inquiries in the fleshly guise of poems about marriage, illness, and above all motherhood--that "continuous egg through time," as she calls it. In "Surviving," for instance, Ostriker mourns expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died at the height of her artistic powers, shortly after giving birth. From Modersohn-Becker, she moves to her own mother's oft-repeated disappointments, and then to a single, shattering truth: "What woman doesn't die in childbirth / What child doesn't murder the mother."

What is our responsibility to these thwarted women, these "broken mothers," our forebears? Don't we owe them more than just grief? For Ostriker, the answer lies in poetry itself. Faced with suffering or atrocity ("The Boys, the Broomhandle, the Retarded Girl"), she concentrates on making us see. "Art destroys silence," she imagines Shostakovich writing in "The Eighth and Thirteenth," then hears "the words never again / Clashing against the words / Again and again / --That music." Therein lies Ostriker's mission: to depict evil and at the same time speak against it. Like the speaker of "Normal," these wry, clear-eyed poems are cheerful in the face of affliction, unflinching in their need to bear witness. --Chloe Byrne

Book Description

1998 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry. In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet's mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love "this wounded / World that we cannot heal, that is our bride."Whether she probes the meaning of chinalist for Poetry. In this selection of poems from thirty years of a distinguished writing career, we see the growth of a poet's mind, heart, and spirit as Ostriker struggles to love "this wounded / World that we cannot heal, that is our bride."Whether she probes the meaning of childhood, family, marriage, and motherhood, or art, history, politics, and God; whether she is celebrating sexuality or confronting mortality, the poet includes "whatever I can grasp of human experience within my art - the good and beautiful, the evil and chaotic. I tell my students that they must write what they are afraid to write; and I attempt to do so myself."

The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions

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A Groundbreaking New Reading of Torah

The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

Women | Spirituality | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books
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The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons

ASIN: 0813524474

Customer Reviews:

A Groundbreaking New Reading of Torah.......2000-07-11

Ostriker brings all the passion and clarity of her poet's vision to a remarkably informed reading of the major stories of Torah (the Jewish Bible). Never narrow or parochial, she cracks open the texts and lets the images beneath the frozen layers of conventional interpretation flow wildly and beautifully. She speaks hard truths in a spirit of compassion and love. If you have any interest in what keeps Judaism alive, read this book!

The Crack In Everything (Pitt Poetry Series)

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The Crack In Everything (Pitt Poetry Series)
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Manufacturer: University of Pittsburgh Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Anthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0822955938

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Ostriker Opened My Eyes
Fascinating! A must-have guide for any aspiring author!

Writing Like a Woman (Poets on Poetry)
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0472063472

Book Description

Essays on women poets and on the relationship between gender and creativity

Customer Reviews:

Ostriker Opened My Eyes.......2006-02-01

A wonderful book of literary criticism discussing the works of HD, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and May Swenson. I was initially leery because the book was first published in the early 80s. However, Ostriker's ideas are still fresh, interesting and thought provoking. She almost has me agreeing with her that HD is the greatest woman poet of the 20th century.... almost. The title might be misleading for some. This is not a how-to manual for aspiring writers. This is a wonderful book of essays that sent me straight out to re-read poets whose work I hadn't read in years. Additionally, Ostriker's comments about her own creativity process have lead me to read some of her work as well. I was not disappointed. This book is a must read for anyone interested in 20th Century poetry.

Fascinating! A must-have guide for any aspiring author!.......2000-03-30

Alicia Ostriker's marvelous guide to writing is not only unique in it's format and style, but is simply a wonderful guide for how to capture the essence of the increasingly popular women's writing movement. Oprah's book club has really increased interest in women's writing, with authors such as Jane Hamilton, Janet Fitch, and Ursula Hegi, to mention just a few. Doubtless, many aspiring writers have wanted to capture that same magic that makes those books so appealing--and this book is the first step! It is compulsively readable, immensely encouraging, and ultimately, a supreme, unparalleled guide to becoming a better, more readable writer. The only thing that prevents this book from receiving Amazon's highest rating is that there could have been more exercises and there still seemed enough information left out to warrant another book or perhaps a series. Nonetheless, this is an extremely enlightening guide and well worth its purchase price. Bravo!

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