Overview
In her celebrated essay "Against Decoration," published in Parnassus, Mary Karr took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days and their attendant justifications: deconstruction and a "new formalism" that elevates form as an end in itself. Her own poems, she says, are "humanist poems," written for everyday readers rather than an exclusive audience--poems that do not require an academic explication in order to be understood. Of The Devil's Tour, her newest collection, she writes: "This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. l am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: 'The mind is its own place and it can make a hell of heav'n or a heav'n of hell ... I myself am hell."
Details
- ISBN-13: 9780811212311
- ISBN-10: 0811212319
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publish Date: April 1993
- Dimensions: 7.95 x 5.34 x 0.21 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.19 pounds
- Page Count: 51
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