Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019. This vital collection restores to print and prominence the work of Douglas Crase, a poet of revisionist invocations of the American landscape and transcendentalist tradition. Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist (1981). In the year of its publication John Ashbery urged Carcanet to consider it for British publication and now, thirty-eight years later, the book appears together with the chapbook entitled The Astropastorals (2017), which together constitute the core of Crase's poetic work. He is among the crucial poets of his generation, but until now his work has not been widely available. An heir to Whitman, to Crane, to Ashbery, Crase deploys what he calls an American 'civil meter', throwing down a wry distinctively American prosodic gauntlet to readers and writers that is likely to be as discussed as Williams's 'variable foot'.
Douglas Crase was born in 1944 in Battle Creek, Michigan, raised on a farm, and educated at Princeton. He has been described in the Times Literary Supplement as 'the unusual case of a contemporary poet whose most public, expansive voice is his most authentic.' His poetry collection, The Revisionist, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National (then called American) Book Award, named a Notable Book of the Year in 1981 by the New York Times, and earned a Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His chapbook of previously uncollected poems, The Astropastorals, was named a 2017 Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. His dual biography of botanist Rupert Barneby and artist Dwight Ripley, Both: A Portrait in Two Parts, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. He is the author of an unorthodox commonplace book, Amerifil.txt, and a collection of essays and addresses, Lines from London Terrace. He has received an Ingram Merrill Award, Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1987 to 1992. He lives with his husband, Frank Polach, in New York and Honesdale, Pennsylvania.
Title: The Revisionist and The Astropastorals
Author: Douglas Crase
ISBN: 9781784108694
Binding:
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Publication Date: 2019-11-28
Number of Pages: 160
Weight: 0.1801 kg
'at once dizzying and uplifting' - Mark Ford, TLS; 'This is such anticipatory, massively omniscient edging work.' - Eileen Myles; 'Crase looks at the city and the landscape with the amused, disabused eye of a lover.' - John Ashbery
