Diaspora - Poems - 15 Collections

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Diaspora - Poems - 15 Collections

Author: William Heyen
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9788119228751
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
Pub. Date: 2024
Price: $100

“There are many ways that William Heyen could be described as a poet of subjects: the Holocaust, for example; ecology and the environment; American ‘manifest destiny’ and the resulting Native American genocide. These are not happy topics, by any stretch of the imagination. Still, one does not choose one’s obsessions…. He never seems able to let himself, or any of his readers, for that matter, rest in a willed blindness in regards to the atrocities, the violence, the countless cruelties that exist everywhere and at all times, whether we look or not…. I call it ‘relentless’ in Heyen’s case because decades working on poems that touch on the most horrific things of which the human race is capable takes more than stamina. Wouldn’t every aspect of one’s conscience seek to avoid probing the depths of such trauma? Despite it all, despite the fact that other writers would have looked away, Heyen keeps writing, keeps stepping back into those places most people would want to avoid. I have wondered if it is his faith in poetry that drives him to take on such a task—his faith that poetry can acknowledge atrocity, can find its language, and by the process of acknowledging come to redeem language.

“In all his poems, book after book, page after page, he keeps burrowing into details—details drawn from unspeakably beautiful ordinariness (a redwing blackbird, for example) to horrifically destructive ugliness (the smell of burning hair, for example)—to publish the fraught, complex Nature and Diaspora of human life on this planet. That singular attention gives the proof of his fixed and focused relentlessness, evidence enough to trust Heyen’s unblinking gaze.”

Richard Deming / Yale University

Author BIO

William Heyen
	William Heyen is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at the College at Brockport, his undergraduate alma mater. He received his Ph.D from Ohio University, & an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from SUNY. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has received NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart & other awards. His work has appeared in hundreds of anthologies, & in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, The Southern Review, & numerous other magazines. He was the first Poet in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace on Long Island, & has lectured at Walt's Camden home. Heyen is the editor or author of more than thirty books including Noise in the Trees, an American Library Association Notable Book for 1975; Crazy Horse in Stillness, winner of 1997's Small Press Book Award for Poetry; Shoah Train: Poems, a Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award; A Poetics of Hiroshima, a Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle selection for 2010. Three new books of poetry (Straight's Suite for Craig Cotter & Frank O'Hara, The Football Corporations, & Hiroshima Suite) & the first four volumes of his massive journal (The Cabin, Hannelore, Poker & Poets, and Too Many Angels), appeared 2013-2017 as did Crazy Horse & the Custers which includes 35 paintings in response to his poems by DeLoss McGraw. Etruscan Press published The Candle, a volume of 45 years of his holocaust poetry, in 2016. The Candle was a 2017 CLSC selection. H_NGM_N Books will publish the fifth of his journal volumes, The Presence I'll Be, in 2020, when MAMMOTH Books will publish a new collection of poems, Vehicles.