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The Revisionist and The Astropastorals

Douglas Crase

Foreword by Mark Ford

Cover of The Revisionist and The Astropastorals by Douglas Crase
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Categories: 21st Century, American, First Collections, Language
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (160 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2019)
9781784108694
£12.99 £11.69
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(Pub. Nov 2019)
9781784108700
£10.39 £9.35
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019

    This vital collection restores to print and prominence the work of Douglas Crase, a poet of revisionist invocations of the American landscape and transcendentalist tradition.

    Douglas Crase is best known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist (1981). In the year of its publication John Ashbery urged Carcanet to consider it for British publication and now, thirty-eight years later, the book appears together with the chapbook entitled The Astropastorals (2017), which together constitute the core of Crase's poetic work.

    He is among the crucial poets of his generation, but until now his work has not been widely available. An heir to Whitman, to Crane, to Ashbery, Crase deploys what he calls an American 'civil meter', throwing down a wry distinctively American prosodic gauntlet to readers and writers that is likely to be as discussed as Williams's 'variable foot'.
    Douglas Crase was born in 1944 in Battle Creek, Michigan, raised on a farm, and educated at Princeton. He has been described in the Times Literary Supplement as 'the unusual case of a contemporary poet whose most public, expansive voice is his most authentic.' His poetry collection, The Revisionist, was ... read more
    'One is immediately grateful for Ford, and Carcanet's, rescuing of Crase from the what-ever-happened-to realms ... Part of Crase's loving update of transcendentalist, multitudinous, vision into his own time is to fit it out for a period of erosion, commerce and reckoning, where the ones left living are "the sufficient remainder".'

    Declan Ryan, Wild Court

    'Douglas Crase's poems are objects of profound and gentle beauty, both in their deliciously poised idiom, and in being monuments to the protean moments of a vast genera of life: civic, environmental, economic, stellar [...] These poems offer us an invitation to think not on but with and through the rhythms of civic life and of landscape. The result is expansive, rendering a sense of conviction that feels like a holding ambience, what Crase calls 'a marginal joy / Proceeding as common sense'.'

    Sam Buchan-Watts, The London Magazine

    'The meaning of home - inhabited or imagined, shared or secluded - is Crase's most persistent subject, and home is a place in which to experiment... Although he often dwells on the way things come together or come good, the activity or motion of his writing is centrifugal... The poet, in longing to arrive at himself, keeps looking elsewhere.'
    Matthew Bevis, London Review of Books
    'Crase looks at the city and the landscape with the amused, disabused eye of a lover.'
    John Ashbery
    'This is such anticipatory, massively omniscient edging work.'
    Eileen Myles
    'This expertly framed volume marks a lasting contribution to American poetry.'
    Publishers Weekly
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