Vise And Shadow PDF Download

In Vise and Shadow, the critically acclaimed poet and memoirist Peter Balakian brings together his most influential essays of the past twenty-five years. He argues that the force of the lyric imagination is able to hold experience under pressure like a vise, while it also shadows history. Precise, lyrical, and eloquent, Balakian's essays explore the ways poetry engages disaster and ingests mass violence without succumbing to the didactic. He gives us new insights into the relationships between trauma, memory, and aesthetic form; his essays on major Armenian voices and the aftermath of genocide are a fresh contribution to contemporary literature and art. Other essays engage painting, collage, song lyrics, and film as forms of enduring lyric knowledge. With a range that includes W. B. Yeats, YeghisheCharents, Joan Didion, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, Arshile Gorky, and Adrienne Rich, Vise and Shadow offers a cosmopolitan vision of the power and resilience of the human imagination.