A Poetics of Hiroshima, William Heyen
Etruscan Advisory Board member, William Heyen, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940, is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at SUNY Brockport. He has been awarded Fulbright, NEA, American Academy of Arts & Letters, Guggenheim, and other fellowships and prizes. Etruscan’s Shoah Train (2003) was chosen as one of five finalists in poetry for the 2004 National Book Awards. Etruscan also published his September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002), The Confessions of Doc Williams & Other Poems (2006), and A Poetics of Hiroshima (2008). He is the author of eighteen books of poetry.
Find out more about William on his author page.
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“William Heyen’s music and meditations continue to amaze. I’ve now read and absorbed all the poems of A Poetics of Hiroshima. I am not ready to write anything about them, except to express my awe.”-Cynthia Ozick
“A remarkable poet in whom the ‘visionary’ and the unblinkingly ‘historical’ are dramatically meshed. He writes with the wild, radiant audacity of the visionary; yet his eye and ear are sharp, unsparing.”-Joyce Carol Oates
In A Poetics of Hiroshima, William Heyen, described by Elizabeth Spires as “our poet of history,” has broken through to face full square what has been working its way to surface through several of his highly-praised earlier books including Erika: Poems of the Holocaust (Time Being Books, 1991) and Shoah Train (Etruscan, 2003): the interfusions, in art and in our desire for art, of beauty and atrocity. Heyen’s lines claw their ways into an aesthetics of formful but obscene sound that may now be our century’s only viable, or possible, home.
Publication date: December 2008
Read an excerpt of A Poetics of Hiroshima.
