Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture

by Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary and visual) imagination," he writes in the preface to this collection, which brings together essayistic writings produced over the course of twenty-five years. Vise, "as in grabbing and holding with pressure," but also in the sense of the vise-grip of the imagination, which can yield both clarity and knowledge. Consider the vise-grip of some of the poems of our best lyric poets, how language might be put under pressure "as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond." And shadow, the second half of the both as noun, "the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective," "partial illumination and partial darkness"; and as verb, to shadow, "to trail secretly as an inseparable companion" or a "force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light on something―a person, an event, an object, a form in nature."

Vise and Shadow draws into conversation such disparate figures as W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Arshile Gorky, revealing how the lyric imagination of these artists grips experience, "shadows history," and "casts its own type of illumination," creating one of the deepest kinds of human knowledge and sober truth. In these elegantly written essays, Balakian offers a fresh way to think about the power of poetry, art, and the lyrical imagination as well as history, trauma, and memory.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 6, 2015

About the author

Peter Balakian is an American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller (October 2003). Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.

Reviews

[World Literature Today]

"A palpable sense of a writer offering new insights into the relationships between trauma, memory, and aesthetic form pervades all [Balakian's] literary work. Vise and Shadow, which gathers a dozen trenchant essays (slightly revised and enlarged) published between 1988 and 2012, describes these relationships by exploring two dimensions of the lyric imagination in poetry, art, and culture. The book argues that the lyric imagination is able to hold experience—especially of trauma—under pressure like a vise, yielding “a unique kind of clarity and knowledge,” while the imagination as shadow embodies many realities, ironically bringing to light certain truths that would otherwise be left in darkness." - Keith Garebian

This book was reviewed in the January 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...