Battus is a pastoral figure, as is Amaryllis. The poem is a system of pastoral parts, including the pastoral bouts of love and loss—always radical and total, self-destructive. It is the oldest poem in my book, and its vehicle is sound. The rest of "Irredenta" is grounded in the Mojave and New Mexico. I was thinking of America as a nation of deprivations, and this led me to the dispossessions of love and land throughout pastoral literature.
Oscar Oswald on "Battus (To Amaryllis)" |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Aaron Anstett on James Wright's "Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco, 1959""This poem, at once narrative, lyrical, and political, led me to more James Wright poems and to Spanish poets beyond Machado, particularly in the bilingual anthology Roots and Wings, which I discovered in my high school library along with the still-powerful Hayden Carruth anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us. From there followed a continuing lifetime of delight, bafflement, and discovery in poems." |
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