Word: proses
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Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose is a "book." It is the 51st installment of the Library of America series, the black-jacketed, red-white-and-blue-striped, gold-embossed collection from the people who bring you Penguin Classics. You might have read Absalom, Absalom out of one. Library of America specializes in collections of novels widely available in paperback which--when tastefully reset and bound in cloth--somehow warrant a $35 price...
...poetry, but also plays, lectures, notes, correspondence. The heretofore definitive Opus Posthumous was first published by Knopf two years after Stevens' death in 1955; the most recent edition contains nearly all of the poems found in the new compendium, including those not incorporated in Stevens' volumes. Collected Poetry and Prose assembles seven volumes of poetry released between 1923 and 1955, Stevens' uncollected poems, three plays, several prose pieces, notebooks, journals and letters; Opus Posthumous contains all but these last three. The few additional verses in Collected Poetry and Prose originate from Stevens' Harvard years, when he served as president...
Despite the more or less chronological arrangements of the poems, Collected Poetry and Prose sheds little light on the composition of Stevens' poetic self. Letters and journals yield some understanding of Stevens-the-man, but these are never placed side by side with the contemporaneous poetry, nor are annotations provided to draw parallels between the poems and relevant passages in the correspondence. At the very end of the collection, the editors include a meager notes section and an exhaustive but thoroughly unenlightening chronology...
...Bird Chronicle is a fairly easy read--little seems to have been lost in Jay Rubin's excellent translation. Each chapter, with such titles as "An Inquiry into the Nature of Pain" and "The Story of the Monkeys of the Shitty Island," has enough comedy and matter-of-fact prose to keep the narrative moving along quickly. However, beneath the deceptive surface-simplicity, the novel is so richly textured that it deserves repeated reading. Filled with brilliant throwaway lines ("her voice like a little broom sweeping off the dust that had piled up on the slates of a venetian blind...
...weird fascination with phlegm. This analogy, intended to emphasize the nature of Okada's adventures in existential wackiness, is repeated throughout the novel ad nauseum. Although it's meant to serve to focus the book's many themes, it seems jarringly unoriginal in comparison with Murakami's cool, prose and inventive characters...