: Michael Schmidt
: Michael Schmidt: Selected Poems
: The Poetry Business
: 9781910367148
: 1
: CHF 6.70
:
: Lyrik
: English
: 190
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The Selected Poem ebooks are a new'digitalonly' series drawn from the works of smith|doorstop poets published during the last 26 years. Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University and a Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. An anthologist, translator, critic and literary historian, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry.

Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University, where he is convenor of the Creative Writing Programme. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. An anthologist, translator, critic and literary historian, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry.

The Love of Strangers

‘So, if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’
Ford Madox Ford,Return to Yesterday (1931)

I

Easy to love the dead! So I love you more each year,

More tenderly, precisely draw you back

Into your landscapes -- they ached without you ...

Your orchard of emerald domes and spires, of fruit

With pebbly skin, grown from the sticks you brought

Out of the clouds around Atlixco, Puebla.

Fuerte they called the tree

That stood against Pacific frosts

And learned to yield crates of fat fruit each season.

In that high village where you found the bud-wood,

Below the snow-line, New Spain’s first poet

Endured her childhood: little bastard

In her grandfather’s rustic library, somehow

Clutching a quill at his long table, 1660.

If l say l am fair, I say no more than is true;

Your eyes attest I am, my deeds prove me so.

Fair! That great medallion at her breast,

And shrouded (like your one daughter) in nun’s habit!

A saint, severe from love and abstinence.

With her you shared thin air, dizzying vista --

Not century, language, faith. Severe you were,

From love as well, without theology, so that you died

In a night ward restrained by nameless sisters

And your ashes were salted over the rusty hectares

Of my godfather’s poor ranc