Maison d'édition: Nick Hern Books
Tempers are fraying in the scorching heat as a rural village is overwhelmed by noise, cars and day trippers… Scratch the surface and you'll find danger bubbling away. Matt Hartley's captivating short play Idyll was first presented as an open-air production by Pentabus Theatre Company in 2021.
From a prize-winning poet, a new collection that chronicles a weekend in the life of a group of friends coming of age in East Harlem at the dawn of the hip-hop era Willie Perdomo, a native of East Harlem, has won praise as a hip, playful, historically engaged poet whose restlessly lyrical language mixes “city life with a sense of the transcendent” (NPR.org). In his fourth collection, The Crazy Bunch, Perdomo returns to his beloved neighborhood to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a “crew” coming of age in East Harlem at the beginning of the 1990s. In poems written in couplets, vignettes, sketches, riffs, and dialogue, Perdomo recreates a weekend where surviving members of the crew recall a series of tragic events: “That was the summer we all tried to fly. All but one of us succeeded." “This immersive poetry collection proceeds like a mixtape or a gnostic gospel … Oracular, intoxicating … Perdomo’s vibrant diction refashions the high lyric, drawing on local cant to render the intimacy of home, friendship, and shared loss. Part rhapsody, part elegy, the book memorializes neighborhood legends, and, even as it impishly indulges nostalgic romance, it never forgets, or forgives, the violence that threatens these young lives.”—The New YorkerVoir livre
In James Matthew Wilson’s fourth full-length collection of poems, the writer joins the great saint and theologian Thomas Aquinas to pause before “the thought of earthly sorrows” and to pray for “such a world that had so much to say.” These poems stand in wonder before the tumult and beauty of created things and the capacity of the soul to rise above it. We move from encounters with the world as revelation, mystery, and promise, to great scenes of sin and fracture such as the bombing of Dresden, the execution of the Roman philosopher Cicero, and scandals in the Church. The volume begins with the prospects for an unborn child soon to enter our stormy world and concludes with a “Farewell” to the place, home, and setting of many of these poems. Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds is a story and pilgrimage through the troubles of our age and beyond them to the reason for our hope, “for all things turn about the love of God.”Voir livre
Pippa Passes was a dramatic piece, as much play as poetry, by Robert Browning published in 1841 as the first volume of his Bells and Pomegranates series.The author described the work as the first of a series of dramatic pieces. His original idea was of a young, innocent girl, moving unblemished through the crime-ridden neighbourhoods of Asolo. The work caused outrage when it was first published, due to the matter-of-fact portrayals of many of the area's more disreputable characters – notably the adulterous Ottima – and for its frankness on sexual matters. Perhaps the most famous passage is below:The year's at the spring,And day's at the morn;Morning's at seven;The hill-side's dew-pearled;The lark's on the wing;The snail's on the thorn;God's in his Heaven - All's right with the world! (Summary by Wikipedia) Characters: Pippa — PhilippaNarrator/Stage Directions — David Lawrence1st 3rd & 5th Student — Lars Rolander3rd & 4th Girl — vanroseGottlieb, 1st and 3rd Police — DougJules, 2nd Police & Monsignor — heyfdLuigi — mbLuigi’s Mother — SilenceOttima, 2nd Girl — TriciaGPhene, 1st Girl — Neeru IyerSebald, Schramm, Bluphocks, Intendant, 2nd, 4th & 6th Student — Barry Eads All tunes used are original and placed in the public domain by the readers.Voir livre
Amelia Alderson, an only child, was born on the 12th November 1769 in Norwich, England. After the death of her mother on New Year’s Eve 1784 she became her father's housekeeper and hostess. The young Amelia was energetic, attractive, and an admirer of fashion. She spent much of her youth writing poetry and plays and putting on local amateur theatricals. At 18 she had published anonymously ‘The Dangers of Coquetry’. Amelia married in the spring of 1798 to the artist John Opie at the Church of St Marylebone, in Westminster, and together they lived in Berners Street where Amelia was already living. Her next novel in 1801 ‘Father and Daughter’, was very popular even though it dealt with such themes as illegitimacy, a socially difficult subject for its times. From this point on published works were far more regular. The following year her volume ‘Poems’ appeared and was again very popular. Novels continued to flow and she never once abandoned her social activism and her call for better treatment of women and the dispossessed in her works. She was also keenly involved in a love of society and its attendant frills. Encouraged by her husband to write more she published Adeline Mowbray in 1804, an exploration of women's education, marriage, and the abolition of slavery. Her husband died in 1807 and she paused from writing for a few years before resuming with further novels and poems. Of particular interest was her short poem ‘The Black Man's Lament’ in 1826. Her life now was in the main spent travelling and working for charities and against slavery. She even helped create a Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in Norwich which organised a parliamentary petition of 187,000 names of which hers was the first name. After a visit to Cromer, a seaside resort on the North Norfolk coast, she caught a chill and retired to her bedroom. Amelia Opie died on the 2nd December 1853 in Norwich. She was 84.Voir livre
The human body is the primary instrument of war, yet those waging war often confront soldiers' bodies in a detached or merely intellectual way. In The Tenderness of Silent Minds, Martha C. Nussbaum, a leading thinker on emotion, morality, and justice, conducts a pioneering study of Benjamin Britten's musical representations of the tender male body amidst the brutality of war, and their ability to transform consciousness by evoking potent, non-personal emotions. Offering a reading of Britten's views about the value and beauty of the body that situates these in the context of his thirty-nine year partnership with his lover, the singer Peter Pears, and also surveying pacifist themes in works written both before and after War Requiem, Nussbaum presents a compelling framework for critically assessing Britten's oeuvre. Nussbaum engages with a remarkably wide range of Britten's works, examining his treatment of aggression and its roots in his collaborations with the poet W. H. Auden, offering readings of the value placed on the body in early partnerships with Britten's beloved and singer Peter Pears, and surveying pacifist themes in Britten's earlier works. The analysis throughout is enriched with perspectives from Britten's personal letters and thoughtful study of the social and political backdrop of fear and homophobic disgust in mid-twentieth century Britain.Voir livre
This is a thriller which traces the history of the Stevens family from 1916 to 2020, covering four generations. What is so unusual about this family is that they are all special intelligence operatives and serve in an ultra-secret unit answering to senior military officers appointed directly by the King. In each generation, the eldest son is selected to carry on the tradition when he reaches the age of 21 years.The operatives are highly-trained as intelligence agents, and their role is to act as judge, jury and executioner of the targets selected. The targets are men and women who have been engaged in treasonous activities or conducting espionage for a foreign power, but the agent has been given the discretion to satisfy himself that the charges are justified before he executes the offender.Voir livre
