On Autumn Lake
Collected Essays
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
On Autumn Lake collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring transcendentalist tradition.
Douglas Crase’s prose is rich with conviction and desire, inspiring as John Yau wrote, “the kind of attention usually reserved for poetry.” His essays, written as rhythmically as poems, take a personal rather than abstract approach, offering committed and sometimes intimate portraits of John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Lorine Niedecker, and others. With generosity of spirit, Crase shares his devotion to poetry, democracy, and landscape in this handsome volume that greatly enlarges the available body of his work and will be seen as the essential complement to his collected poems.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Four decades of critical writing from poet Crase (The Revisionist) come together in this intensive collection. Crase is skeptical about calling the pieces criticism; rather, "they are appreciations or predilections, though to be truthful they were more like affairs of the heart, affairs of attention and intellectual desire, rather than criticism." In "An Outsider's Introduction to Emerson," he writes that "there is no book, not even Leaves of Grass, that is closer to the source of poetry than Emerson's Essays," and in "Unlikely Angel," he posits that "however much they crowed of their French influence," the New York School poetry movement was "America waiting to happen." Many of the pieces are personal: in "A Schuyler Ballad," he recounts watching James Schuyler write a poem, and the title essay is an appreciation of his relationship with John Ashbery: "It was convenient for John Ashbery, and dumb luck for me, that I was living in Rochester and could pick him up at the airport whenever he arrived from New York to visit his mother." Crase's writing is colorful, though some of the people he writes about may be lost on readers not immersed in American postwar poetry. For student and scholars of the subject, though, this will be worth a look.
