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Into the Ruins

2024 revised edition, with several new poems. Into the Ruins confronts much of the human experience left out of the balance by postmodern poetry, often compared to the Alexandrians and the Neoterics, when writers similarly concentrated on the minor themes of personal life, while ignoring the challenging experience of the public realm. Suffused with a global tragic vision, into the ruins of the 20th Century, Glaysher has his gaze fixed firmly on the 21st.

"Out of the mass of recent poetry books, here is one you should read." -William Allegrezza, Jack Magazine

"A poet of great skill and integrity. A journey, a poetry, which asks us to bring together broken parts of our cultures (both East and West) and search for a new identity, perhaps a new world order. His finely crafted poems are accessible and have a purpose that needs to be heard." -Margo LaGattuta, WPON, "Art in the Air"

FROM the Preface:

"The work of such artists as Francisco Goya in his war paintings and Los Caprichos, Kaethe Kollwitz's drawings, Wilfred Owen's poems of WWI, Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," and many of the poems of Robert Hayden, a fellow Detroiter, were powerful examples and influences on me that spoke to my sense of life and helped open the way forward for me as a poet."

"1103676972"
Into the Ruins

2024 revised edition, with several new poems. Into the Ruins confronts much of the human experience left out of the balance by postmodern poetry, often compared to the Alexandrians and the Neoterics, when writers similarly concentrated on the minor themes of personal life, while ignoring the challenging experience of the public realm. Suffused with a global tragic vision, into the ruins of the 20th Century, Glaysher has his gaze fixed firmly on the 21st.

"Out of the mass of recent poetry books, here is one you should read." -William Allegrezza, Jack Magazine

"A poet of great skill and integrity. A journey, a poetry, which asks us to bring together broken parts of our cultures (both East and West) and search for a new identity, perhaps a new world order. His finely crafted poems are accessible and have a purpose that needs to be heard." -Margo LaGattuta, WPON, "Art in the Air"

FROM the Preface:

"The work of such artists as Francisco Goya in his war paintings and Los Caprichos, Kaethe Kollwitz's drawings, Wilfred Owen's poems of WWI, Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," and many of the poems of Robert Hayden, a fellow Detroiter, were powerful examples and influences on me that spoke to my sense of life and helped open the way forward for me as a poet."

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Into the Ruins

Into the Ruins

by Frederick Glaysher
Into the Ruins
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Into the Ruins

Into the Ruins

by Frederick Glaysher

Overview

2024 revised edition, with several new poems. Into the Ruins confronts much of the human experience left out of the balance by postmodern poetry, often compared to the Alexandrians and the Neoterics, when writers similarly concentrated on the minor themes of personal life, while ignoring the challenging experience of the public realm. Suffused with a global tragic vision, into the ruins of the 20th Century, Glaysher has his gaze fixed firmly on the 21st.

"Out of the mass of recent poetry books, here is one you should read." -William Allegrezza, Jack Magazine

"A poet of great skill and integrity. A journey, a poetry, which asks us to bring together broken parts of our cultures (both East and West) and search for a new identity, perhaps a new world order. His finely crafted poems are accessible and have a purpose that needs to be heard." -Margo LaGattuta, WPON, "Art in the Air"

FROM the Preface:

"The work of such artists as Francisco Goya in his war paintings and Los Caprichos, Kaethe Kollwitz's drawings, Wilfred Owen's poems of WWI, Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," and many of the poems of Robert Hayden, a fellow Detroiter, were powerful examples and influences on me that spoke to my sense of life and helped open the way forward for me as a poet."

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780967042190
Publisher: Earthrise Press
Publication date: 05/15/2009
Pages: 88
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.21(d)

About the Author

Frederick Glaysher is an epic poet, rhapsode, poetcritic, and author or editor of ten books. He has been a Fulbright-Hays and NEA scholar on China and India. He studied writing under a private tutorial, at the University of Michigan, with the poet Robert Hayden and edited Hayden's poetry and prose.He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree from the University of Michigan, the latter in English, and for a decade taught at several colleges and universities.He lived for more than fifteen years outside Michigan-in Japan, where he taught at Gunma University in Maebashi; in Arizona, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation, site of one of the largest internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII; in Illinois, on the central farmlands and on the Mississippi; ultimately returning to his suburban hometown of Rochester, Michigan. He has given over sixty epic poetry readings and performances, several in theatres, in the USA, Canada, and Scotland.

Read an Excerpt

Eleanor Roosevelt

Thousands wrote, amended, quibbled
over wording and content,
upheld the traditions of East and West,
of Aquinas and Confucius,
defended individual and social rights.

She was not alone, but she alone had
the vision, the drive, the determination
to create, out of lesser loyalties,
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the Magna Carta of all mankind.

Albert Einstein

Because he changed our thinking
he knew our thinking has to change
from stopping at national borders
to a new kind of loyalty,
holding relative
the bellicose dimension of hatred
extending throughout the continuum of time,
given a mass beyond its due.

Though ridiculed and heckled, he gauged
the pressure of the fear the jingoes
misjudged with their outdated thinking.
And when his efforts prove not to have
been in vain, all humankind will admire
the earthly shape of his wisdom.

Dag Hammarskjöld

No more of these sad tones
of fear and the scourge of war,
of chaos and anarchy,
of the passions of humankind.

Though the first movements wander
among the dark and threatening
conflicts of Beethoven's Ninth,
the "Ode to Joy" shall come.

All the millions will unite
as brothers, surrendered
to the way of peace,
to a higher synthesis of joy.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface ix
I
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 3
Midnight Visitors 4
The Pit of Darkness 5
Danse Macabre 6
Locusts 7
Camp II 9
Gulag Wayfarers 10
Oracle Bones 11
Heartland America 12
II
Into the Ruin 15
Old Baltimore 20
Rodin's Gates of Hell 21
Hibakusha Nightmare 24
Advent of the Beast 25
Raskolnikov's Dream 26
To the New City 27
Long Journey Through Night 29
The Crowned Maitreya 30
Carnelian Blemish 32
Leader of the People 33
Vignette 35
Chairman of the Board 36
At a Mass Grave 38
Wild Goose Pagodas 39
III
A Conversation on the Forum 43
Mud-Wrestlers 47
Derrida in Doubt 48
The Looking-Glass 49
IV
Elijah Lovejoy 53
Eleanor Roosevelt 54
Albert Einstein 55
Dag Hammarskjöld 56
Homage to Mark Tobey 57
Elegy for Robert Hayden 60
V
To Penelope 63
Intimations 64
Kagi 65
Basic Training 66
A Visit to Aunt Amy's 67
Leaving the Old Country 68
The Dream 69
The Dark Wood 70
Chamber Music 71

Foreword

Now at the end of the twentieth century, far from withdrawing further into the self and into an obfuscating use of language, poets must turn to viewing and contemplating the real world, where men butcher and kill, love and hate, aspire and sometimes achieve. For out of our experience and contemplation of the past and present, a deeper understanding of history and of what it means to be a human being is now beginning to emerge, opening the way to a new future, in a new century. W. H. Auden once wrote that radical change in artistic style is contingent on "radical change in human sensibility." The unrelenting movement of modern times toward the oneness of humankind has sufficiently been made explicit--an epic movement that allows, produces, and requires a fundamental change in sensibility.
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