This bilingual collection by Transtrà ¶mer, recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2011 and widely considered Sweden's most important poet, offers poems from 1954 through 2004. Patty Crane, first-time translator, went through her translations carefully with Transtrà ¶mer at his home, to ensure fidelity to the original. David Wojahn writes in his introduction that Transtrà ¶mer "is a poet almost helplessly drawn to enter and inhabit those in-between states that form the borderlines between waking and sleeping, the conscious and the unconscious, ecstasy and terror, the public self and the interior self"--the kind of poetry that most appeals to me.
.The Tree and the Sky
There's a tree walking around in the rain,
hurrying past us in the pouring gray.
It has an errand. It's gathering life out of the rain
like a blackbird in an orchard.When the rain lets up, the tree stops.
Catch a straight glimpse of it, still on clear nights
waiting like us for the moment
when snowflakes leaf-out in space.
A short documentary about the life of 2011 Nobel Prize winner Tomas Transtrà ¶mer
4. Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency by Hal Foster (Verso)
Hal Foster--an important contemporary critic who has edited The Anti-Aesthetic and written Design and Crime and The Art-Architecture Complex--defines and investigates the terms abject, archival, mimetic, precarious, and post-critical when it comes to the relation of post-1989 art with the "general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror." Foster wants to demonstrate "the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair, at other ties burlesquing it."
The second approach, which can be called neo-Situationist, urges artists to take up images that agglomerate in image flows and information networks in ways that give them enhanced publicity and power--publicity and power that might be redirected if these images are reformatted effectively by artists. In this "epistemology of the search," as David Joselit calls it, such flows and networks might also be diagrammed in such a manner that "meaningful patterns" become apparent. This visualization is very important, but such pattern recognition might be either too much or too little to expect of the viewer: too much in the sense that these flows and networks exceed the capacity of individuals to map them, and too little in the sense that contemporary art-viewing is often mere pattern-seeking as it is.
Conversation with Hal Foster, Princeton University professor of art, hosted by The Clark in 2011.
5. At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions, edited by Didier Fassin, translated by Patrick Brown and Didier Fassin (PlutoPress).
Using an ethnographic/anthropological perspective, the ten scholars included in this collection take a stab at defining the state not as a neutral bureaucratic entity but through the concrete actions of its agents, investigating the police, the courts, prisons, social services, and mental health facilities as the arenas of moral agency. Institutions, these scholars argue, are not just impartial arbiters of laws and rules but reflect the morality of the state by mobilizing values and judgments.
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