This collection of poetry about the cinema includes work by almost 100 English-language poets. It guides readers through the silent era to talkies, movie stars, home movies and beyond - the final poem being about recording TV films onto VHS.

A timely and engaging exploration of cinema's influence on verse--a treat for poetry lovers and film buffs alike

The Poetry Handbook is a lucid and entertaining guide to the poet's craft, and an invaluable introduction to practical criticism for students. Chapters on each element of poetry, from metre to gender, offer a wide-ranging general account, and end by looking at two or three poems from a small group (including works by Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott), to build up sustained analytical readings. Thorough and compact, with notes and quotations supplemented by detailed reference to the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a companion website with texts, links, and further discussion, The Poetry Handbook is indispensable for all school and undergraduate students of English. A final chapter addresses examinations of all kinds, and sample essays by undergraduates are posted on the website. Critical and scholarly terms are italicised and clearly explained, both in the text and in a complete glossary; the volume also includes suggestions for further reading. The first edition, widely praised by teachers and students, showed how the pleasures of poetry are heightened by rigorous understanding and made that understanding readily available. This second edition — revised, expanded, updated, and supported by a new companion website - confirm The Poetry Handbook as the best guide to poetry available in English.

This Companion offers a multi-disciplinary approach to literature on film and television. Writers are drawn from different backgrounds to consider broad topics, such as the issue of adaptation from novels and plays to the screen, canonical and popular literature, fantasy, genre and adaptations for children. There are also case studies, such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the nineteenth-century novel and modernism, which allow the reader to place adaptations of the work of writers within a wider context. An interview with Andrew Davies, whose work includes Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Bleak House (2005), reveals the practical choices and challenges that face the professional writer and adaptor. The Companion as a whole provides an extensive survey of an increasingly popular field of study.

This collection of specially written essays offers both student and theatregoer a guide to one of the most celebrated American dramatists working today. Readers will find the general and accessible descriptions and analyses provide the perfect introduction to Mamet's work. The volume covers the full range of Mamet's writing, including now classic plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, and his more recent work, Boston Marriage, among others, as well as his films, such as The Verdict and Wag the Dog. Additional chapters also explore Mamet and acting, Mamet as director, his fiction, and a survey of Mamet criticism. The Companion to David Mamet is an introduction which will prepare the reader for future work by this important and influential writer.

The poems in Liver come at the reader from many angles at once, like a whirlwind or a warm shower. Charles Harper Webb is a poet of contradictions: humor and heartbreak, depth and accessibility, playfulness and seriousness, raw energy and careful craft. His poems glorify the spirit, but also the flesh, exemplified by the liver, the "organ whose name contains the injunction Live!... great One-Who-Lives, so we can too." Even at their darkest, their most outraged and sorrowing, Webb's poems affirm the world, and help us live in it gladly. Winner of the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Selected by Robert Bly

The definitive biography of one of the great movie icons of the twentieth century, and a wide-reaching appraisal of the actor's singular legacy.

Notes from the Dream House is a 'best of' selection of reviews by the celebrated Observer film critic Philip French. Spanning half the history of cinema, his reviews cover a great variety of films, from westerns and gangsters to art movies and musicals – the hits and the misses, the good, the bad and the ugly. French takes on films as disparate as The Gospel According to St Matthew and Ted, The Remains of the Day and Caligula. His reviews are personal, witty, and sharply perceptive. Time and again he reveals not only an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema but also an erudition, an enthusiasm, and a boundless curiosity. Taken together, they form an illuminating commen¬tary on modern culture; but above all they are a distillation of one man's lifelong love of cinema, a worthy memorial to one of the most respected and beloved of modern critics.

This definitive biography of one of the world’s greatest comedians unflinchingly yet affectionately uncovers the man behind the cigar. Here is the amazing career of the man the world recognized as Groucho: the improbable disasters of the vaudeville years; the Marx Brothers, an act so funny W.C. Fields refused to follow it; the unprecedented Broadway success of The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers; the cinematic triumphs of Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera; and the marvelous come-back career as king of the game show hosts with You Bet Your Life. Here, too, is the man himself: a lonely middle child who aspired to be a doctor; a man who sabotaged three marriages; a father alternately indulgent and cruel. Intelligent and thorough, hilarious and sad, Groucho is a spectacular biography of the century’s most influential comedian.

Born in 1914 in Beatrice, Nebraska, and presumed dead in 1955 (when he apparently leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge), Weldon Kees has become one of the better-known ?unknown? American poets of the twentieth century, his fiction and poetry largely kept alive by other poets. But Kees was also that rare artist who excelled in many genres and media: a skillful painter, filmmaker, jazz musician, and composer. He was a gifted critic as well, and his criticism bears the marks of his own deep and broad engagement with the arts.øWeldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury is the first book to reflect the full range and reach of Kees?s artistic activities. Bringing together writers from various disciplines?art historians, poets, literary critics, curators, and cultural scholars, including Dore Ashton, James Reidel, Dana Gioia, and Stephen C. Foster?this volume offers a wide variety of perspectives through which to evaluate the meaning and significance of Kees?s achievement. Although the essays themselves partake of the diversity of Kees?s impact on the culture, all agree on one fundamental point: any history of postwar American culture that neglects Kees?s multifaceted contribution is ultimately incomplete.