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| Starting Point Charles Martin's present collection carries the weight of the past by Shawn Sturgeon
Indeed. In Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems, the newest offering from the Sewanee Writers' Series, Martin offers readers emotional, intellectual, ironical, and formal payouts, gathering sixty-nine poems from three of his previous collections, as well as more than fifty pages of new poems—a body of work spanning almost three decades. He has been twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, received a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, a 2001 Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The author of five previous books—Room for Error (1978); Steal the Bacon (1987); What the Darkness Proposes (1996); a translation, The Poems of Catullus (1990); a study of the poet, Catullus (1992), and a forthcoming translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses—Martin's work is distinguished by wit, perspicacity, and a union of content and form. Starting from Sleep demonstrates the claim that poetry provides us with a crucial knowledge about the world, a knowledge Martin describes in his poem "A Walk in the Hills Above the Artist's House" as "a place within the work of mind." |
Sewanee Writers' Series Publishes Twelfth Book
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When Charles Martin was growing up in the Bronx, New York, he had neither the private space in his family's apartment to write nor the inclination to engage in literary activities. His first creative forays consisted only of a few overwritten, unfinished novels inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs. When he was fifteen, though, a relative gave him a book of haiku, and he began to write in lines of five, seven, and five syllables. "Though commercially less viable than novels," Martin says, "haiku could at least be completed, usually in the brief time between homework and dinner. They offered an immediate emotional payout: I was hooked."
The Sewanee Writers' Series is pleased to announce the March 2004 release of its twelfth book, Greg Williams's Boomtown. Boomtown is the sharp hip tale of New York City dot-commers after the Y2K panic has passed. Internet start-ups are thriving, the stock market is climbing, and the dawn of the new century is just a little too bright for its own good.