More Miracle Than Bird

For fans of Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife and Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility, Alice Miller's sweeping debut novel charts the love story of two of literature’s most fascinating characters: Georgie Hyde-Lees and her husband, W. B. Yeats. On the eve of World War I, twenty-one-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees—on her own for the first time—is introduced to the acclaimed poet W. B. Yeats at a soirée in London. Although Yeats is famously eccentric and many years her senior, Georgie is drawn to him, and when he extends a cryptic invitation to a secret society, her life is forever changed. A shadow falls over London as zeppelins stalk overhead and bombs bloom against the skyline. Amidst the chaos, Georgie finds purpose tending to injured soldiers in a makeshift hospital, befriending the wounded and heartbroken Lieutenant Pike, who might need more from her than she is able to give. At night, she escapes with Yeats into a darker world, becoming immersed in the Order, a clandestine society where ritual, magic, and the conjuring of spirits is practiced and pursued. As forces—both of this world and the next—pull Yeats and Georgie closer together and then apart, Georgie uncovers a secret that threatens to undo it all. In bright, commanding prose, debut author Alice Miller illuminates the fascinating and unforgettable courtship of Georgie Hyde-Lees and W. B. Yeats. A sweeping tale of faith and love, lost and found and fought for, More Miracle than Bird ingeniously captures the moments—both large and small—on which the fates of whole lives and countries hinge.

On the eve of World War I, twenty-one-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees--on her own for the first time--is introduced to the acclaimed poet W. B. Yeats at a soirée in London. Although Yeats is famously eccentric and many years her senior, Georgie is drawn to him, and when he extends a cryptic invitation to a secret society, her life is forever changed. A shadow falls over London as zeppelins stalk overhead and bombs bloom against the skyline. Amidst the chaos, Georgie finds purpose tending to injured soldiers in a makeshift hospital, befriending the wounded and heartbroken Lieutenant Pike, who might need more from her than she is able to give. At night with Yeats, she escapes these realities into an even darker world, becoming immersed in The Order, a clandestine society where ritual, magic, and the conjuring of spirits is practiced and pursued. As forces--both of this world and the next--pull Yeats and Georgie closer together and then apart again, Georgie uncovers a secret that threatens to undo it all. In bright, commanding prose debut author Alice Miller illuminates the fascinating and unforgettable courtship of Georgie Hyde-Lees and W. B. Yeats. A sweeping tale of faith and love, lost and found and fought for, More Miracle than Bird ingeniously captures the moments--both large and small--on which the fate of whole lives and countries hinge.

Poetry.

An essential volume for generations of writers young and old, Bird by Bird is a modern classic. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition will continue to spark creative minds for years to come. For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title: “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

Feathers are an evolutionary marvel: aerodynamic, insulating, beguiling. They date back more than 100 million years. Yet their story has never been fully told.In Feathers, biologist Thor Hanson details a sweeping natural history, as feathers have been used to fly, protect, attract, and adorn through time and place. Applying the research of paleontologists, ornithologists, biologists, engineers, and even art historians, Hanson asks: What are feathers? How did they evolve? What do they mean to us? Engineers call feathers the most efficient insulating material ever discovered, and they are at the root of biology's most enduring debate. They silence the flight of owls and keep penguins dry below the ice. They have decorated queens, jesters, and priests. And they have inked documents from the Constitution to the novels of Jane Austen. Feathers is a captivating and beautiful exploration of this most enchanting object.

Basing her approach on historical sources, Rosalie Osmond explores the way the soul has been represented in different cultures and at different times, from ancient Egypt and Greece, through medieval Europe and into the 21st century.

"In this bold, speculative, and immensely learned study . . . Tiffany[‘s concept of] lyric substance--the ‘sense’ of materiality supplied to us by poets like Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore--constitutes a world whose inaccessibility is legitimized by the principles of scientific materialism. Thus lyric, too long on the periphery of materialist discourse, emerges as being squarely in its center."—Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University, author of The Futurist Moment and Wittgenstein’s Ladder "A lyrical inquiry into the circle of ideas: materialism, science, poetics. Winding through the whole is a fascinating exploration of toys--children’s toys, physicists’ toy models, philosophers’ robots, nuclear weaponeers’ toy towns. . . . My hope is that this book will contribute to a growing interest not in cleaving science from the arts but rather in exploring, poetically, the language, images and things that illuminate both." —Peter Galison, Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and Physics, Harvard University "A brilliant achievement, synthesizing the history of science and poetics, technology and the arts, in an iconology of materialism. . . All that is solid melts into air in this book, but just as quickly the airy poems of our climate condense into material, objective forms, weird gadgets, and objects of scientific research. . . A wonderful feast of learning and wit." —W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, author of Picture Theory and Iconology "In clear-eyed and gorgeous prose, Toy Medium moves the question of Art's encounter with Science to an utterly original point of conflagration: where matter is mostly not matter. . . . Going to the bottom of the Imagination, where it still truly involves images, Tiffany explores how we have learned to see the inscrutable via our imagistic grasp of materiality. . . . This book is daring, brilliant, and deeply clever."—Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of English, Harvard University, author of Materialism and winner of the Pulitzer Prize

English and American authors contribute poems and scholarly essays to this volume in order to reflect Standford's career as a poet and a gifted scholar. The contributions reflect a rich variety of subject matter from Shakespeare to Ezra Pound; the poetry includes a drama written in verse by Donald Davie.

Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death. Through close reading of selected poems, the first section of Making the Void Fruitful assesses Yeats’s spiritualised treatment of corporeal themes, exploring sex and eroticism as the expression of a duality inherent to his ontological and supernatural convictions. The power-producing tension in Yeats’s work is not only intellectual but emotional. At its vital centre is his Muse: the beautiful political firebrand, Maud Gonne, whose activist Republican politics he considered his one real rival. Through close engagement with the poems and plays she inspired, the second section explores Yeats’s complex relationship with Maud, an obsessive and unrequited love which he sublimated and transformed into the greatest body of Muse poetry since Petrarch, in whose tradition of spiritualized eroticism Yeats, perhaps the last of the great Romantics, was consciously writing. Shaped by the conviction that no modern poet exceeded Yeats in animating the enduring themes of love and spirituality through poetry, this book emphasises the influence, of Blake, Nietzsche, and John Donne, on what Yeats called ‘the thinking of the body’. Grounded firmly in the textual materiality of Yeats’s oeuvre, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of W.B. Yeats, as well as to those in the fields of Anglophone literatures and cultures, and philosophy.

History was central in a variety of ways to Yeats's poetic development and to the meaning of his work. In this study, Whitaker suggests that history was for the poet a mysterious interlocutor, which Yeats saw at times as a bright reflection of himself and again as a dark force opposed to that self. The poet's internal dialogue is viewed as projection into historical symbolism. Originally published in 1964. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Literary Theories in Praxis analyzes the ways in which critical theories are transformed into literary criticism and methodology. To demonstrate the application of this analysis, critical writings of Roland Barthes, Harold Bloom, Cleanth Brooks, Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Norman Holland, Barbara Johnson, Jacques Lacan, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Scholes are examined in terms of the primary critical stance each author employs—New Critical, phenomenological, archetypal, structuralist/semiotic, sociological, psychoanalytic, reader-response, deconstructionist, or humanist. The book is divided into nine sections, each with a prefatory essay explaining the critical stance taken in the selections that follow and describing how theory becomes literary criticism. In a headnote to each selection, Staton analyzes how the critic applies his or her critical methodology to the subject literary work. Shirley F. Staton's introduction sketches the overall philosophical positions and relationships among the various critical modes.

Dhvani and Epiphany examines the work of major Indian poets like Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar; the struggle of young poets to find an audience; and the art of fiction. But its main focus is on the nature of creativity. How does an artist communicate his meaning? What makes a work genuinely creative? Through a sensitive exploration of poetry – ranging from the simple poems of a child, Poorna Prajna, to the complex “Byzantium Poems” of Yeats – the first seven essays try to show how a poem comes to life when it speaks to us and we listen to its dhvani and respond. Even in fiction, it is not all realism. There is irony in exploring the paradoxical nature of reality; events taking on symbolic overtones; and epiphany, moments of illumination and insights – when surprising correspondences are seen. Writers cannot surprise and delight their audience if they themselves are not surprised and delighted by such insights.

Extending to over 1300 pages Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader offers a comprehensive and pleasurable introduction to modern Irish literature in a single volume. The Reader contains over 400 pieces including letters, diaries, newspaper and journal articles, songs, poems, critical essays, literary profiles, entire plays and short stories as well as extracts from novels and other longer works. Texts which until now have been out of print or difficult to locate are made easily accessible once more."

FRIGHTENED MONSTERS. STOLEN TIME. AND ONE SERIOUSLY UNDERESTIMATED DAMSEL. Katie ran from the magical world years ago. She never planned on being dragged back in by a prophesying clamshell. The seers believe she alone can prevent an apocalypse of ruined time and broken worlds. Bran the Crow King believes she can save him from his cannibalistic grandfather. Katie believes they're all nuts. One thing is for certain: she's not waiting around for help. Operation Katie Saves her Own Damn Self is officially on.

Quantum Poetics examines the way modernist poets appropriated scientific metaphors as part of a general search for the pre-verbal origins of poetry. Daniel Albright traces Modernism's search for the elementary particles from which poems were constructed. The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued Yeats, Eliot and Pound, writers intent on remapping the general theory of poetry. Using models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force, both through his sequence A Vision and through his belief in, and defence of, the purity of symbols. Pound's whole critical vocabulary, Albright claims, aims at drawing art and science together in a search for poetic precision, the tiniest textual particles that held poems together. Through a series of patient and original readings, Quantum Poetics demonstrates how modernists created a whole new way of thinking about poetry and science as two different aspects of the same quest.