Emily Grosholz

Despite a distinguished resume that includes a Pulitzer Prize and appointments as consultant to the Library of Congress, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and New Hampshire Poet Laureate, Maxine Kumin and her work remain relatively unexamined by contemporary critics. This collection fills that gap through analyses by her fellow poets of topics like Kumin's diction and prosody, her literary forebears, and characteristic thematic patterns. Also included are poems, some first published here, to or about Maxine Kumin.

Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin

Telling the Barn Swallow

Essays and verses in tribute to one of America's foremost poets by Alicia Ostriker, Henry Taylor, Wendell Berry, and others.

Bernard W. Bell

James Benjamin Stewart

W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most profound and influential African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century. This volume addresses the complexities of Du Bois' legacy, showing how his work gets to the heart of today's theorizing about the color line.

Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics

W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture

This collection of essays treats the historical, philosophical and literary dimensions of Simone de Beauvoir's thought and celebrates the 50th anniversary of her "The Second Sex". It locates her work in the intellectual and political upheavals of Paris in the 1930s and 1940s and tackles the relationship between theory and concrete situation.

The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir

Herbert Breger

Mathematics has stood as a bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences since the days of classical antiquity. For Plato, mathematics was evidence of Being in the midst of Becoming, garden variety evidence apparent even to small children and the unphilosophical, and therefore of the highest educational significance. In the great central similes of The Republic it is the touchstone ofintelligibility for discourse, and in the Timaeus it provides in an oddly literal sense the framework of nature, insuring the intelligibility ofthe material world. For Descartes, mathematical ideas had a clarity and distinctness akin to the idea of God, as the fifth of the Meditations makes especially clear. Cartesian mathematicals are constructions as well as objects envisioned by the soul; in the Principles, the work ofthe physicist who provides a quantified account ofthe machines of nature hovers between description and constitution. For Kant, mathematics reveals the possibility of universal and necessary knowledge that is neither the logical unpacking ofconcepts nor the record of perceptual experience. In the Critique ofPure Reason, mathematics is one of the transcendental instruments the human mind uses to apprehend nature, and by apprehending to construct it under the universal and necessary lawsofNewtonian mechanics.

The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge

Emily Grosholz weaves elements of philosophy, mathematics and the sciences into her experience of the social and natural world, to produce wise and cosmopolitan poetry of high lyricism. The Stars of Earth starts with new poems chronicling the months of a year lived and observed, followed by selections from Grosholz’s previous volumes in chronological order. This rare treasury spans four decades of Grosholz’s acclaimed poetry. PRAISE FOR THE STARS OF EARTH: Emily Grosholz is a poet of radiant intelligence, patient lyricism, and meticulous craft. She has a gifted naturalist’s regard for the living world and wherever she looks that world, for its part, offers her its poetry. With a philosopher’s wit and a mathematician’s eye for beauty, she can link geometry and physics to the apricot color of a robin’s breast. She also writes with great empathy for her subjects. The Stars of Earth collects four decades of her elegant and excellent work. We are lucky to have it. — Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry Compressed on the page then wafting ever outward on wings of imagination, fine poetry and fine theorems are first cousins. Or, more rarely, in poems like Emily Grosholz’s, twins: “Timid and fluid rainbows/ Over the nacreous surfaces/ Of shells, on peacock feathers/ And soap-bubbles, appear/ Whenever incident light/ Reflects off nether and upper/ Laminae of films, one wave train/ Tagging after another/ Like a younger sister.” Read this book. — Marjorie Senechal, author of Shaping Space I admire Emily Grosholz because of the sounds her poems make. She is always experimenting, even when the results seem effortless. The cunning irregularities are what most compel: the reader is never allowed to relax. The general readers among us are admitted courteously to the civilizing company. The heart, not as a hackneyed valentine but as a living muscle, is always present as pulse and passion. The overwhelming sense these poems give is of affirmation. — Michael Schmidt, author of New and Collected Poems The Stars of Earth is that rarest of books. Emily Grosholz chronicles everything from love to loss, childhood to marriage to parenthood. She explores two continents and the minds of scientists, artists, friends, long-lost family. And as befits a poet-philosopher whose pursuits include the philosophy of mathematics, she achieves potent mixes of the daily and the deep: Nietzschean thought served up in a deli; a toddler’s first steps along “the frail parabolas of love.” — Melissa Balmain, author of Walking in on People

The Stars of Earth - new and selected poems

There are two topics that seem largely unexplored by American poets of our time. One is the deep attachment parents (and perhaps most especially working parents) form for their infants and how they perceive their children (perhaps as Blake saw them) with all the wisdom of their innocence. The second is the relationship of science, mathematics and metaphysics to our everyday life. Here is a book that explores, and to some degree attempts to define, the writer's investigations in those two domains, one stemming from her experience as a mother, the other from her profession as a philosopher of science. And it is this juxtaposition of maternal emotion and detached, almost clinical, analysis that provides Grosholz's wonderful new collection with such grace and such power.

Poems

The Abacus of Years

Catharine Savage Brosman

Terese Coe

Frederick Wilbur

a review of poetry, prose & art

Able Muse, Summer 2017 (No. 23 - print edition)

This collection brings together 40 years of essays about poetry and literature written by Emily Grosholz. The first section includes essays about some of her favorite poets and thinkers in the United States, England, France and Germany. The second section brings poetry into relation with ethics, politics and practical deliberation, and the third considers it alongside science and imagination. The last section is an homage to The Hudson Review, for whom she has served as an Advisory Editor for many years. As a philosopher, Emily Grosholz has written and thought about feminism, racism, and mathematics and science, which has led her to admire all the more the distinct wisdom of poetry. These essays show how poetry reorganized language and memory, eros and experience, and time and place, and how and why it deepens our understanding of life.

Walking along the Hudson

Reflections on Poetry and the World

Emily R. Grosholz

The legacy of Simone de Beauvoir has yet to be properly assessed and explored. The 50th anniversary of the publication of The Second Sex inspired this volume which brings together philosophers and literary critics, some of whom are well known for their books on Beauvoir (Bauer, Le Doeuff, Moi), others new to Beauvoir studies though long familiar with her work (Grosholz, Imbert, James, Stevenson, Wilson). One aim of this collection is to encourage greater recognition of Beauvoir's philosophical writings through systematic reflection on their place in the canon and on her methods. The Second Sex played a central role in the profound shift in philosophy's self-understanding that took place in the latter half of the twentieth century, and today offers new problems for reflection and novel means for appropriating older texts. Its reflective iconoclasm can be compared to that of Descartes' Meditations; its enormous, directly discernible impact on our social world invites comparisonwith Locke's Two Treatises of Government. The collection also examines the relationship between Beauvoir's literary writing and her philosophical thought. Deeply concerned with the critical and creative powers of reason as well as with the betterment of our suffering world, Simone de Beauvoir wrote in a variety of genres in addition to the philosophical essay: the novel, political journalism, and the memoir. The multiplicity of her voices was closely related to her philosophical project. Since Beauvoir's method (like that of W. E. B. du Bois) proceeded from her own immediate experience, her reflections had to find expression sometimes as narrative, sometimes as autobiography, sometimes as argument. The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir demonstrates the many ways in which Beauvoir's writings, in particular The Second Sex, can serve as resources for thought, for the life of the mind which is as concerned with the past and future as it is with the present.

Emily Grosholz

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