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- Apples from Shinar
A special centenary edition of this American poet's critically acclaimed collection
Apples from Shinar was Hyam Plutzik's second complete collection. Originally published in 1959 as a part of Wesleyan University Press's newly minted poetry series, the collection includes "The Shepherd"—a section of the book-length poem "Horatio," which earned Plutzik a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize. "The love and the words and the simplicity," that mark Plutzik's poetry, writes Philip Booth, "are all here [in Apples from Shinar], and the poems come peacefully, and wonderfully, alive." With a previously unpublished foreword by Hyam Plutzik and a new afterword by David Scott Kastan, this edition marks the centenary of Plutzik's birth and will introduce a new generation of readers to the work of one of the best mid-century American poets.
Preface
Because the Red Osier Dogwood
The Dream About Our Master
To My Daughter
I am Disquieted
As the Great Horse
If Casualty is Impossible
The Old War
The Premonition
Jim Desterland
After Looking into a Book
The Geese
The Mythos of Samuel Huntsman
Beware, Saunterer
The Airman Who Flew Over
The Priest Ekranath
I Imagined a Painter
The Bass
The Importance of Poetry
Winter, Never Mind Where
The Zero That is All
For T.S.E. Only
A New Explanation of the Quietude
Portrait
Requiem for Edward Carrigh
And in the 51st Year
Man and Tree
Of Objects Considered as Fortresses
A Philosopher on a Mountain
Trio for Two Voices and a Woodwind
The Mythos of the Man From Enoch
The Milkman
The Last Fisherman
The Shepherd (from Horatio)
Afterword by David Scott Kastan
HYAM PLUTZIK (1911–1962) was the Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at the University of Rochester. The author of six volumes of poetry, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. DAVID SCOTT KASTAN is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University and one of the most widely read of American literary scholars.
"Hyam Plutzik's poems have haunted me for twenty-five years. And they seem even more alive and special now than they did when I first found them. He has a kinship with Isaac Bashevis Singer, drawing his strengths in a similar way, directly and openly, from that ancient tradition, yet engaging the modern world as a stripped soul—with a point-blank, wholehearted simplicity of voice. His visions are authentic and piercing, and the song in them is strange—dense and harrowing, with unforgettable tones. The best of his work seems to me marvelously achieved, a sacred book."
~Ted Hughes, Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems
""We will never know what Plutzik might have yet written had he lived longer, but those who know his work agree that a significant literary voice was prematurely silenced.""
~Edward Moran and Philip Witte, Paris Review
""Though written in a more formal language and with more classical allusions than the Beats would tolerate, Plutzik's poem treats familiar Cold War themes of anxiety, terror, paranoia, espionage, frustrated diplomacy and civic honesty with deftness and authenticity, while foregrounding the voices of the marginalized common citizen.""
~Edward Moran, Times Literary Supplement
""He can tell a story which is both true verse and convincing narrative. The most remarkable of his accomplishments is a reworking of the Hamlet myth into a weird, medieval version which evokes the darkest principles of human nature. But the other poems disclose an earnest, searching power of mine that is one of the rarest virtues of modern writing.""
~The Minnesota Review
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