About the Book
This book explores the changing perception of time and space in avant-garde, modernist, and contemporary poetry. The author characterizes the works of modern Russian, French, and Anglo-American poets based on their attitudes towards reality, time, space, and history revealed in their poetics. The author compares the work of major Russian innovative poets Osip Mandelstam, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Joseph Brodsky with that of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and, in spite of the postmodernist "estrangement" of reality, the author proves that similar traces can be found in the work of contemporary American poets John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. Both affinities and drastic differences are revealed in the poets' attitudes towards time-space, reality, and history.
About the Author :
Ian Probstein is associate professor of English at Touro College. He has published ten books of poetry, translated more than a dozen poetry volumes; and has compiled and edited more than thirty books and anthologies of poetry in translation.
Review :
"Ian Probstein's magisterial study of the aesthetics of time in modernist and contemporary poetry offers illuminating exegeses of touchstone poems by Mandelstam, Eliot, Khlebnikov, Yeats, Pound, Brodsky, and Ashbery, among others. With the dialectical force of a 'feast of citations, ' The River of Time brilliantly interweaves Russian and American poetry."--Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
"The River of Time is unique in its range and depth: it is, I believe, the first study of Modernism--and specifically of the time-space chronotope in Modernism--to read the poetry of Yeats, Eliot and Pound against such very different poets as Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, and Mandelstam. Ian Probstein's carefully documented study also takes up the post-World War II generation, again moving easily between Joseph Brodsky and John Ashbery, with a final excellent chapter on the contemporary poet Charles Bernstein. Throughout The River of Time, the author provides excellent new analyses of both familiar and unfamiliar poems, and his own translations of some of the most difficult Russian poems make this a book a treasure trove for all students of Modernism."--Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English, Stanford University and University of Southern California, Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society
"Ian Probstein's The River of Time is an ambitious study of modernist poetry in two major ways ... in the sheer number and variety of the poets discussed in the book ... [and] in the parameters that Probstein sets for his study. ... Probstein's frame of reference, broad as it is, holds refreshing potential: it allows the author to move, with varying ease, between numerous voices of Russian and Anglo-American literary contexts. All too often, in the discussion of modernist literature, scholars downsize modernism to a rigid and geographically limited canon, which does not incorporate modernist authors from a broader map of national contexts, including Russia. While Probstein focuses on the works of some of the central modernist figures, he also seeks to embrace the complexity and diversity of modernisms (we can appreciate here the creative mind of an experienced translator and editor of numerous anthologies)." --B. Tokarsky, University of Cambridge, Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 96, No. 4
-- "Slavonic and East European Review"
I am reminded once again of Brodsky's fine account of Anna Akhmatova's ability to see the tragic events of her time 'first through the prism of the individual heart, then through the prism of history'. What remains so striking about such a vision, continues Brodsky, is that 'These two perspectives were brought into sharp focus through prosody, which is simply a repository of time within language'. Simply? Ian Probstein's The River of Time offers the help we need to gauge the real complexity of that word 'simply'.-- "Textual Practice"
