new book

[Suzanne Roberts]

MARIA CHRISTINA FUMAGALLI

The Flight of the Vernacular
Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2001. XXVI,303 pp.
(Cross/Cultures 49)
ISBN: 90-420-1476-8                                             Bound   EUR 75,- /US-$ 70.-
ISBN: 90-420-1466-0                                             Paper   EUR 30,-/US-$ 28.-

In this book, Dante, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott engage in an eloquent
and meaningful conversation. Dante's capacity for being faithful to the
collective historical experience and true to the recognitions of the
emerging self, the permanent immediacy of his poetry, the healthy state of
his language, which is so close to the object that the two are identified,
and his adamant refusal to get lost in the wide and open sea of
abstraction - all these are shown to have affected, and to continue to
affect, Heaney's and Walcott's work. The Flight of the Vernacular, however,
is not only a record of what Dante means to the two contemporary poets but
also a cogent study of Heaney's and Walcott's attitude towards language and
of their views on the function of poetry in our time. Heaney's programmatic
endeavour to be "adept at dialect" and Walcott's idiosyncratic redefinition
of the vernacular in poetry as tone rather than as dialect - apart from
having Dantean overtones - are presented as being associated with the belief
that poetry is a social reality and that language is a living alphabet bound
to the "opened ground" of the world.
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Suzanne Roberts
Rodopi
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1046 AK Amsterdam
The Netherlands

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Tel:  31 (0) 20 611 48 21
Fax. 31 (0) 20 447 29 79