Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture, Peter Balakian (softcover)

In this volume of essays written over the past 25 years, poet Peter Balakian 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 the reader new insights into the relationships between trauma, memory, and aesthetic form. His essays on major Armenian voices like Yeghishe Charents, Siamanto, and Arshile Gorky, and the aftermath of genocide are a fresh contribution to contemporary literature and art. His range of essays includes also W.B. Yeats, Joan Didion, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Adrienne Rich.