In this strongly visual and environmentally engaged collection, award-winning poet and translator Jody Gladding explores landscape as a source of language in lyrics that operate as physical acts in three-dimensional space.
Deeply invested in landscape, the spiders my arms operates where landscape and language converge. It opens the page into a compositional field in which words appear as constellations to create multiple, interwoven meanings as they interact with each other and with the reader who moves freely among them, fully participating in the making of poems that are spatial, non-linear, and different every time.
Small Lives (Vies minuscules), Pierre Michon’s first novel, won the Prix France Culture. Michon explains that he wrote it "to save my own skin. I felt in my body that my life was turning around. This book born in an aura of inexpressible joy and catharsis rescued me more effectively than my aborted analysis." Le Monde calls it "his chef d’oeuvre. A bolt of lightening." In Small Lives, Michon paints portraits of eight individuals, whose stories span two centuries in his native region of La Creuse. In the process of exploring their lives, he explores the act of writing and his emotional connection to both. The quest to trace and recall these interconnected lives seared into his memory ultimately becomes a quest to grasp his own humanity and discover his own voice.
Translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays.
Jody Gladding's Stone Crop, the winning volume in the 1992 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, was selected from among 700 entries in this annual competition. Stone Crop is a collection of poems written over the past ten years. Many of the poems represent Gladding's attempts to synthesize landscape with sensibility, to restore the organic world's hold on our human imagination—its gossip value. Other poems try to find an effective political language, free of diatribe but not of outrage, frequently using mythical counterparts to make contemporary events resonate. The poems have other traits in common. Their attention often moves from the thing to its name, underscoring Gladding's conviction that the same organic processes generate both. Many wrestle with their metaphors, expressing the poet's attraction to and suspicion of that poetic device. Many layer images, aiming toward texture rather than pronouncement. And most are, at least to some degree, autobiographical.
Daniel Odier reveals his passionate experiences with a female Tantric master who taught him the suppressed practices of her ancient order.
In 1968 Daniel Odier left Europe for the Himalayas, searching for a master who could help him go where texts and intellectual searching could no longer take him. He wanted everything: the wisdom and spirituality gained from the life of an ascetic and the beauty, love, and sensuality of a life of passion. He found both in Shivaic Tantrism, the secret spiritual path that seeks to transcend ego and rediscover the divine by embracing the passions. In an isolated Himalayan forest Odier met Devi, a great yogini who would take him on a mystical journey like none he had ever imagined. At times taking him beyond the limits of sexual experience, at times threatening him with destruction, she taught him what it is to truly be alive and to know the divine nature of absolute love.
Tantrism is the only ancient philosophy to survive all historical upheavals, invasions, and influences to reach us intact by uninterrupted transmission from master to disciple, and the only one to retain the image of the Great Goddess as the ultimate source of power.
This is the personal memoir of one of France's most honored writers translated by Jody Gladding.
This study by Gilbert Dahan offers an overview of Jewish conditions in medieval Western Christendom, and discusses the changing patterns of Christian-Jewish polemical confrontation during the 12th and 13th centuries. Dahan analyzes the common literary genres through which Christians attempted to convert Jews.
Translated by Jody Gladding.
"A renowned French scholar takes readers through the social and cultural history of stripes in this imaginative... playful, but learned book that will doubtless have an influence" (The New York Times Book Review).
From the taboo striped cloaks of the Middle Ages to the liberating stripes of the French and American flags, The Devil''s Cloth by Michel Pastoureau chronicles the checkered past of this maligned and misunderstood pattern that has been linked to everything from medieval scandals to religious and political uprisings to contemporary fashion statements. The story begins nearly a thousand years ago, when the monks of the Carmelite Order were ordered by the Pope to surrender their striped garment - to superstitious minds a sure sign of the devil. Anti-stripe sentiment raged throughout the Middle Ages, becoming the de rigueur fashion for prostitutes, hangmen, lepers, court jesters, and disloyal Round Table knights. Over the centuries, the list expanded to include Jews, heretics, adulterous wives, madmen, convicts, and servants. Briefly rescued from ignominy by the Renaissance, the stripe enjoyed a resurgence in 1775, where its newly conferred status as an enduring symbol of freedom paved the way for a subsequent European comeback. With lively narrative style, Pastoureau traces the fascinating trajectory of the ubiquitous stripe from the stripe-related stress of biblical figures - Cain, Delilah, and Judas prominent among the - -to the bathing suits, pinstripe suits, and pajamas of today. Not even the hapless zebra escapes the skewering lens of history. Whether its subject is horizontal or vertical, stylish or subversive, this richly informative book will appeal to readers of every stripe.
Translated by Jody Gladding.
In The Eleven, Pierre Michon lets us into the world of Corentin, a painter shaoed by—and who eventually shapes—history. Brought up among provincial aristocracy to become a favorite of Parisian society—his paintings are commissioned by Louis XV’s mistress—Corentin’s career rides the Tides of the French Revolution. His masterpiece, "The Eleven," is an enigmatic Last Supper, representing the eleven members of the Committee of Public Safety (including Robespierre and Saint Just) during the Reign of Terror. Corentin and company, his work of art, and the historical tableau of the French Revolution come to life in dazzling, even painterly, detail. A potent blend of fact and fiction, The Eleven is a beautifully written, astute meditation on the nature of history itself and the artist’s role in it.
Translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays.
Some of the most powerfully moving tales in Western literature are to be found in the epics of Celtic Ireland. Heroes and heroines like Finn Mac Cool, Grainne, and Cuchulainn are now familiar names, and their exploits have even been novelized for the contemporary reader. But the value of these stories extends far beyond mere entertainment. In Celtic myth the adventure of a hero and a warrior is not only an instinctive search for answers to the great human metaphysical problems, but also a palpable, even sensual experience. The dividing line between sacred and profane is forever shifting in ways that can be shocking, if not incomprehensible, to a person accustomed to the logical systems based on classical thought.
Distrustful of the written word, Celtic druids forbade anything involving their tradition from being put into writing. However, Christian monks chose to preserve all they could of the oral tradition on paper. Unfortunately, they did not hesitate to alter what they couldn't comprehend, or what their Christian sensibilities found shocking. In this collection of some of the most important narratives in the rich Irish tradition, Jean Markale restores these texts to their original form and reveals how the Celtic spirit is on the verge of reclaiming its rights.
Translated by Jody Gladding.
In ancient Babylon she was Anat, in Egypt, Isis and Hathor, Dana in Celtic Ireland, Rhea and Demeter in Greece, and in India, Anapurna the Provider. She is the Great Goddess, the Goddess of Beginnings, the symbol of Earth and the giver of life, the Vast Mother, who represents all the powers and mysteries of creation for early humanity.
Shifting her solar association onto masculine deities and blackening those of her symbols that, like the serpent, could not be assimilated, patriarchal societies forced the preeminent power of the feminine into an obscure and subservient position. Yet, as shown by noted scholar Jean Markale, the Goddess did not simply disappear when her position was usurped, and the power she represents has been the source of continuous religious devotion from ancient times through the Middle Ages up to the present day.
In looking at the plethora of myths, sites, and sanctuaries devoted to this powerful figure, The Great Goddess provides abundant evidence of the extraordinary permanence of her worship--even at the heart of those religions that tried to destroy her.
Translated by Jody Gladding.
