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George, Emery E.
About the author: Emery George, professor emeritus of German at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is a writer and independent scholar. He has published twenty books, including eight of poetry. Two of the poetry collections: Blackbird: A Book of Poems on the World and Work of Franz Kafka (1993) and Valse Triste: Songs and Ballads (1997), as well as two scholarly books: Hölderlin and the Golden Chain of Homer: Including an Unknown Source (1992) and Metropolitan Icons: Selected Poems of János Pilinsky in Hungarian and in English (1995) are also available from The Edwin Mellen Press
1993 0-7734-0031-1In this, his seventh poetry collection, Emery George pays homage to the storyteller who has most urgently addressed our age. Arranged in three parts, the poems celebrate Prague ("Oh City, City!"), Kafka and his circle ("Franti_ek"), and selected stories ("Tales of the Frightened Imagination"). The Prague of Kafka's day was one of Europe's most beautiful cities (it still is). For Kafka it was a place to try to escape from. He felt claustrophobic there, and yearned for the open spaces of travel. He seems to have felt that the ancient and ornate buildings were like people: forbidding, staring, incommunicado.-- from the Preface
2003 0-7734-3432-1
The diapason of the present volume is joy and hope in our new century and millennium. The one hundred poems explore the formal as well as mimetic possibilities of the villanelle. Among subjects, music and art are prominent. There are cycles of poems in homage to Bach, Mozart, the renaissance German sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, the late Joseph Brodsky, and one of the startling minds of our century, Arthur Koestler. The poems aim at being an experience in sound, but they also invite us to think. Problems of perception are broached, and social and political comment is by no means absent. Song and comment reach one of their peaks in “Exemplary Tale” (no. 67), a poem on two young people in love, one a Croat, the other a Serb, talented opera singers and both dedicating themselves to working toward a more peaceful future.
1992 0-7734-9606-8
Consisting of two essays, this book investigates the impact on Hölderlin's poetic imagery of the Homeric metaphor of the golden chain of nature. It contrasts A. O. Lovejoy's ideas on "the great chain of being" with the results of recent research. It also announces discovery of an unknown source to which Hölderlin was indebted: an early seventeenth-century Jesuit devotional tract. The study considers the full range of the poetic work, including the poems, Hyperion, and Empedokles. The book is illustrated with two figures, and concludes with two appendixes of verbal data, a bibliography, and indexes of names and of Hölderlin's works.
1995 0-7734-9058-2
This is the first American selection of the work of Hungary's most distinguished postwar poet, János Pilinszky (1921-1981). This bilingual edition, comprising about one-third of Pilinszky's collected verse, represents all six of his major collections: Trapeze and Parallel Bars (1946), On the Third Day (1959), Metropolitan Icons (1970), Splinters (1972), Dénouement (1974), and Crater (1976). Among the poems chosen from Metropolitan Icons is a complete new translation of the dramatic recitative "KZ Oratorio". All of the Holocaust poetry as well as major, personally-attuned writing is also presented. The selection is preceded by a detailed Introduction, and closes with Notes on the Poems, many of which solve literary puzzles and make suggestions for further study. There is a bibliography of primary and selected secondary sources, including a list of Pilinszky's work available in English.
1996 0-7734-2691-4
Poetry by the author of Blackbird, Metropolitan Icons, and Holderlin and the Golden Chain of Homer.