New Directions 22

By James Laughlin

The contents, lively and varied as always, of this year's New Directions Annual, the twenty-second in the series which began in 1936, range from the topical, in an impressive new poem by Ferlinghetti on The Enigma of Ho Chi Minh's Funeral , to one of the important source texts of the modern literary movement, a translation by David Harris of Gottfried Benn's "play of ideas," The Voice behind the Curtain . Once again, the Annual is international: Stephen Stepanchev has translated a group of poems by the Yugoslavian poet Vasko Popa; Samuel Grolmes and Yumiko Tsumura present the Japanese poet Ryuichi Tamura; Dennis Silk (Israel) blends parody and fantasy in the prose "journey," Montefiore; there is a scene from the play Sunday They'll Make Me a Saint by the Greek-American writer Demetrius Toteras; and from Britain we have Stuart Montgomery's verse sequence, Circe, a section of photographs of the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Scotland) and a group of drawings by the poet Charles Tomlinson. Three of the young American poets in ND22 are active in the Black movement: Ed Roberson, Quincy Troupe and Al Young. Richard Meyers is a promising discovery, and we welcome Robert Lowry again with a fine poem. Of exceptional interest this year are the stories of Paul Breslow, Carol Emshwiller, Paul Friedman, James B. Hall and Mark Jay Mirsky.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811203336
• ISBN13: 9780811203333
• Release Date: January 1970
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.3"