Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption - Brossura

Donovan, Matt

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1595347607 ISBN 13: 9781595347602

Casa editrice: Trinity Univ Pr, 2016

Riassunto

The title cloud of Matt Donavans extraordinary nonfiction debut, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape, refers to the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that in 79 AD buried the city of Pompeii under twenty feet of ash. Today a remarkable 2.5 million people a year visit the ruins of the Italian city. Its no surprise, then, that Donovan found the sacred place a site of inspiration and power, devoting six pieces to exploring the homes and villas that have been preserved. Donavan takes off from various points in the Roman ruins to explore the inconstancy of any given moment alongside the processes used to make casts of the vacancies left by the citys dead to create positive monuments to their last gestures.

Donovan pursues the image of the cloud throughout his spell-binding meditations on ruin and redemption. He explores the cloud of the original atomic bomb test at the Trinity site. From there, he inevitably touches on the same cloud rising above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He uses the occasion of the provocative film The Day After, aired in 1983, starring JoBeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg, John Cullum, Jason Robards, and John Lithgow, to explore a fictional account of a nuclear attack on the U.S. Though his mother objected to Donovans seeing the film, it was shown in his school, giving him another cascading image of the mushroom cloud, which was viewed by 100 million people, making it the most-watched TV broadcast in history. In his signature style, Donovan takes off from the literal event to explore how our imaginations are shaped by the popular images of nuclear destruction.

Moving from atomic devastation to the beauty of the cherry blossoms in Washington, DC, Donovan finds the sort of uncanny connections that enliven his work at every turn. For the war years when the U.S. was fighting Japan, the cherry trees in our nations capital were downplayed. Much later they were resuscitated to create a festival to celebrate the lovely clouds of cherry blossoms beloved by visitors and citizens alike.

Tragedy becomes more personal for the author when a dear friend is diagnosed with cancer. And there are heart-stopping references to the campus of Kent State, where as a kid, Donovan explored the site and the ruination of six students killed during an anti-Vietnam-war protest.

In the final section of the book, Almost a Full Year of Stone, Light, and Sky, Donovan focuses on the Pantheon in Rome. This expansive lyric essay serves as a kind of bookend to the Pompeii sequence at the beginning. Instead of meditating on a place of apocalypse, however, Donovan explores an ancient building that has avoided, against all odds, of becoming a ruin. In addition to investigating the structures history, the author explores the uses of secular beauty through interwoven meditations on subjects as diverse as Walter De Marias Lightning Fields, the legend of the Tower of Babel, the paintings of Caravaggio, and the September 11 Tribute in Light memorial.

Nothing seems to be beyond the reach of this stunningly original writer. The pleasures he delivers inA Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape have to do with the purity of his imagination, the flawless connections he makes from antiquity to the present, from personal experience to historical events, from architecture to art installation to literature. The redemptive power of beauty hovers over this spectacular work, reminding us that darkness and light make an inextricable pattern over our lives. Matt Donovan finds that the delicate balance to honor both, to find the subtle but ineffable rhythms between ruin and redemption, is to find what ultimately makes life worthwhile, what gives meaning to the sorrow and joy of being human.

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Informazioni sull'autore

Matt Donovan is the author of the book of poems Vellum (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner, 2007), which won the 2006 Bakeless Prize in Poetry as well as the 2008 Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, andPoetry, and his nonfiction has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, Seneca Review, Threepenny Review, andVirginia Quarterly Review.

Donovan is the recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature, a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Breadloaf Fellowship in poetry, and a Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship. His work has been acclaimed in The New Yorker, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Matt Donovan received his MA from Lancaster University and his MFA from New York University where he attended as a New York Times Fellow. He is currently co-chair of the Creative Writing and Literature Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Trinity Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1595347607
• ISBN 13: 9781595347602
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 253
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile