ISSN #
9780887482786
Description
Joseph Brodsky, in one of the essays in On Grief and Reason, writes that the twentieth century is the century of the displaced person. Writers in this century more than any other—from James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway to Paul Celan and Czeslaw Milosz to Seamus Heaney and Brodsky himself—have explored the ordeal of abandoning, voluntarily or involuntarily, a home that had become culturally or socially oppressive. Ukrainian-American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky, in Edge of House and Cuban-American poet Aleida Rodriguez, in Garden of Exile, while eschewing the political concerns of many of these writers, similarly draw on the impact of displacement and relocation in their lives to create an art deeply concerned with psychological and emotional boundaries and the sense of a divided self and world that they create. Though Orlowsky’s parents emigrated from Ukraine rather than herself, the legacy of displacement deeply informs Edge of House, her second collection. Orlowsky sees life as constituted by many kinds of boundaries and sees living as consisting in transgressing or respecting these boundaries. – Robert Levine, Poet Lore
Publisher
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date
1999
Type
Book
Language
English
