Ancestors and Species. New & Selected Ethnographic Poetry.

by Tom Lowenstein

Overview

Tom Lowenstein's work as poet and as ethnographer (specialising, above all, in the Inuit of Alaska) has always been interpenetrative, the poetic work deeply informed by the scholarly. This volume selects poetry from his whole career to date, concentrating on the faultline where his ethnographic concerns meet his poetic concerns. Poems have been selected from 'Filibustering in Samsara' and 'Ancient Land: Sacred Whale', as well as from more recent uncollected work. 'Ancestors and Species' makes it clear that Tom Lowenstein is one of Britain's most remarkable poetic voices, at the same time fascinating, and impossible to categorise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780907562740
Publisher:	Shearsman Books
Publication date:	10/24/2005
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

Tom Lowenstein was born near London in 1941. After completing his education at Cambridge University, he taught for six years in English secondary schools. he has also taught English and creative writing at Northwestern University, worke for the Alaska State Museum and spent a year, in the mid-1970s, in an Alaskan Eskimo village, recording and translating its legends and histories. This work was later to bear fruit in a number of publications: Eskimo poems from Canada and Greenland; The Things That Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People (University of California Press, 1992); Ancient Land: Sacred Whale (Bloomsbury, 1993; Harvill, 2000). He has also written on Buddhism.