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New Directions launches the 2017 Pamphlets series with Lesley Harrison & David B. Hobbs (editor of George Oppen's 21 POEMS)

On Lesley Harrison's BLUE PEARL: 

What does Northness sound like? The music of Iceland, Greenland, the Svalbard Archipelago. Songs of birds and ice and wind. In Lesley Harrison’s Blue Pearl , her first collection to appear in the United States, northern landscapes come alive through an intimacy of language that forms a collective sense of place through weather, history, local myths and customs, and childhood fairy tales. Dogs on the shale, eels in the current, a ship strains as it’s pulled up by a needle, a whaler unwinds the skin—Harrison’s poems voyage forth with visible breath, “as snow falls as light is in paper.”

On George Oppen's 21 POEMS:

The Objectivist Press published George Oppen’s first book, Discrete Series, in 1934. Four years earlier, the twenty-one-year-old poet had sent an unbound sheaf of typewritten poems with the title 21 Poems handwritten in pencil on the first page to Louis Zukofsky, who forwarded them on to Ezra Pound in Paris. These poems, suffused with Oppen’s love for his young bride Mary, as well as his love of sailing, are strikingly unique. The scholar David B. Hobbs recently found 21 Poems buried in Pound’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and it appears here as a collection for the first time.

 

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