Brief Mention

Editions

The Life and Poetry of Manoah Bodman: Bard of the Berkshires. Ed. Lewis Turco. Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America. 1999. xiv, 98 pp. $29.50.

Born in 1765 in rural New England, Bodman was an Enthusiast deeply affected by the Second Great Awakening and a mystic given to verbal communications with visions (particularly of his sister-in-law and the devil). He was also the author of broadsides, booklets, and poems. This volume compiles the writer’s “curiously modern” poetry and provides information about his eccentric life.

The White Tomb: Selected Writings. By Stuart Merrill. Ed. Edward Foster. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House. 1999. ix, 182 pp. Paper, $16.95.

Described by the editor as a kind of fin-de-siècle Gertrude Stein, Stuart Merrill (1863–1915) was a celebrated Symbolist poet, a supporter of Socialism, and a translator who played a central role in making Mallarmé and Verlaine available in the United States and Yeats and Symons known in France. The White Tomb brings together Merrill’s poetry (composed in both French and English), translations, and essays, including his famous piece written on the occasion of meeting Walt Whitman shortly before the elder poet’s death.

“Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson. Ed. Raymond Nelson. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia. 1999. xxviii, 473 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $18.95.

“Poor Boy Blue / the Great White World / and the Black Bourgeoisie / have shoved the Negro Artists into / the white and not-white dichotomy, / the Afroamerican dilemma in the Arts—/ the dialectic / of to be or not to be / a Negro.” This excerpt from “Harlem Gallery” is one of the poems collected in the first complete edition of the work of Melvin B. Tolson, whose three volumes of poetry elicited critical acclaim and debate at the time of their publication. The collection is introduced by Rita Dove; the extensive critical notes are by editor Raymond Nelson.

Over West: Selected Writings of Frederick Eckman with Commentaries and Appreciations. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin and David Adams. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, Univ. of Maine. 1999. ix, 225 pp. Paper, $15.95.

Frederick Eckman was an important editor (his magazine and chapbook series Golden Goose published William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and many other important poets), an influential teacher, and a sensitive poet. Editors Linda Wagner-Martin and David Adams bring together selections of Eckman’s poetry, reviews, and critical essays, as well as tributes by friends, colleagues, former students, and fellow poets.

William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson: A Transatlantic Connection. Ed. Barry Magid and Hugh Witemeyer. New York: Peter Lang. 1999. xxviii, 161 pp. Paper, $29.95.

“Through Hugh Kenner I have just become acquainted with your name, God be praised! An Englishman to whom my name is not anathema is almost to be classed by me as an event. Not that I give a damn except as it signalizes the advent of someone who may turn out to be a friend.” So began William Carlos Williams’s correspondence with the poet and translator Charles Tomlinson, now collected in a volume that also features a selection of the poets’ critical writings, poems by Tomlinson that show Williams’s influence, and observations about their friendship by Hugh Kenner, Paul Mariani, and Donald Davie.

Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Ed. Carlos L. Dews. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 1999. xxii, 199 pp. $24.95.

In an interview with Rex Reed on her last birthday, Carson McCullers explained her motivations for writing an autobiography: “I think it important for future generations of students to know why I did certain things, but it is also important for myself. I became an established literary figure overnight, and I was much too young to understand what happened to me or the responsibility it entailed. That, combined with all my illnesses, nearly destroyed me. Perhaps if I trace and preserve for other generations the effect this success had on me it will prepare future artists to accept it better.” Incomplete when McCullers...