Following this thread, I am reminded only that reading Mary Barnard's
famous translation was one of the core early moments of my encounter with
poetry. And I would add that recently, the finest books on he that I have
read are Anne Carson's amazing _Eros, the Bittersweet_, itself more a long
prose poem than a study, & Page duBois's collection of essays, _Sappho Is
Burning_, as well as the more recent translations by Jim Powell in _Sappho:
A Garland_. But then I can never get enough of her (in the way I read her,
lacking ancient Greek).
In recent literary history, I would argue that the Canadian poet, Phyllis
Webb, in her _Naked Poems_ (1966), has come as close to replenishing the
senseof poesis we have from *the fragments* as anyone.
On a completely different matter, the great Canadian poet, Al Purdy, died
this weekend at the age of 82. He was one of those poets whose work seemed
to 'represent' a country's sense of its 'voice' to it. A wadnerer, who
traveled the whole country & found something everywhere to celebrate, even
in the sometimes terrible history, he created a poetic idiom that
influenced many. Our home-grown Whitman, Dennis Lee, another poet, called
him.
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
But the dead are wholehearted about being dead,
no half measures no shilly-shallying:
they're committed, dedicated
to purposelessness.
Al Purdy
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