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Author

Eric Ormsby

Eric Ormsby's latest book is Ghazali (Oneworld). Eric Ormsby was born in Atlanta, raised in Miami, and now lives in Montreal, where he is a professor in the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. His Poetry has appeared in most of the major journals in Canada, England and the U.S., including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Paris Review, Descant, Parnassus and The Oxford American. In recent years he has been a regular contributor of essays and reviews to The New Criterion, as well as to Parnassus, Books in Canada and The Yale Review. His first collection of poems, Bavarian Shrine and other poems, appeared in 1990 and won the QSpell Award for 1991. In the following year he received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for “outstanding work as a poet.” His 1992 collection entitled Coastlines was a finalist for the QSpell Award of that year. A third collection, For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems appeared in 1997 with Grove Press in New York. His work has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry as well as in The Norton Introduction to Literature. A fourth collection of poems, entitled Araby, appeared in 2001 with Signal Editions (Montreal). A collection of esays, most originally published in The New Criterion, will appear in Fall 2001. As a scholar, Ormsby specializes in medieval Islamic theology and philosophy and regularly contributes articles to academic journals in that field. He has travelled widely in the Islamic world as a researcher and a consultant. He is married, with two sons, and lives with his wife Irena, an architectural historian in Montreal.

Articles

The eternal incognito (Books) , October 2009, 67

View from a falling house (Books) , June 2009, 71

Waiting for the grammarians (Features) , April 2009, 4
On the Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems of C. P. Cavafy, newly translated by Daniel Mendelsohn.

Instants in a looking-glass (Books) , February 2009, 66
A review of The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, edited by J. D. McClatchy.

To a chickadee in winter (Poems) , December 2008, 33

Honoring the ancestors (Poems) , December 2008, 34

Against the logicians (Poems) , December 2008, 35

The house in his mind (Books) , November 2008, 58
On the collected novels and stories of William Maxwell.

The kingdom of Never-to-be (Features) , April 2008, 4
On Walter de la Mare.

Flashes of lightning (Books) , January 2008, 68
On War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky.

A mind emparadised (Books) , November 2007, 73
On Paradiso by Dante Aligheri, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander.

The Heraclitus of New Hampshire (Books) , June 2007, 69
On The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen

Robert Bridges's new cadence (Features) , April 2007, 15
On the poetry of Robert Bridges.

The god within? (Features) , February 2007, 20
On Harold Bloom's view of what constitutes the best of American religious poetry.

Delousing the soul (Features) , September 2006, 34
Joris-Karl Huysmans' devilish prose

The cracked kettle of Flaubert (Books) , May 2006, 66
On Flaubert: A Biography by Frederick Brown.

An austere opulence (Features) , April 2006, 10
On Geoffrey Hill's reading at the Sheldonian Theatre.

Simious seductions (Books) , March 2006, 68
Dane Kennedy's "The Highly Civilized Man" reviewed.

From Moses to Musa (Features) , October 2005, 23
Two great holy books revisited.

Cellar (Poems) , June 2005, 28

The jewel in the cobra's mouth (Books) , May 2005, 68
A review of The Clay Sanskrit Library, co-published by New York University Press.

A song and a mistake (Books) , November 2004, 61
A review of Metamorphoses, by Ovid, translated and with notes by Charles Martin; introduction by Bernard Knox.

Petrarch: a splendid excess (Features) , September 2004, 18
On Francesco Petrarch’s love, hate, and precision of feeling.

Blowin' in the wind (Books) , June 2004, 74
A review of Dylan’s Visions of Sin, by Christopher Ricks.

My grandfather's pocket watch (Poems) , May 2004, 31

Traveler (Poems) , May 2004, 30

Of lapdogs & loners: American poetry today (Features) , April 2004, 5
On the distinctive state of poetry in America. The eighth of our series “Lengthened shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-first Century.”

The voice impersonator (Features) , March 2004, 34
On the success of Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth, in revealing the polyphonic development of Ezra Pound’s works.

Waiting for the golden pig (Letters) , February 2004, 43
On the Christmas season in the Czech capital.

The disaster parade (Books) , January 2004, 69
A review of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, by Blake Bailey.

White phalaenopsis (Poems) , December 2003, 51

Daybreak at the straits (Poems) , December 2003, 52

The "born Schulmeister" (Features) , September 2003, 30
On the teacher and mentor Shlomo Dov Goitein, the great German-Jewish scholar of Islam.

Shadow language (Features) , April 2003, 22

The scabrous lyricism of Thomas Bernhard (Books) , February 2003, 64
A review of Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian, by Gitta Honegger.

Whispered disclosures (Books) , January 2003, 67
A review of Complete poems, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Walter Martin.

Victor Hugo: the ghost in the pantheon (Features) , October 2002, 23
Considering Hugo upon his 200th year.

Orpheus with arsenic (Books) , February 2002, 63
A review of François Villon’s The Legacy & The Testament, translated by Louis Simpson.

The battle of the book: the research library today (Features) , October 2001, 4
The second in a series titled “The survival of culture”

Rimbaud: sophist of insanity (Features) , June 2001, 16
Upon the publication of Rimbaud: A Biography, by Graham Robb.

Gardens for the sleeves (Features) , April 2001, 22

The last Elizabethan: Hart Crane at 100 (Features) , February 2001, 12
Occasioned by the centennial of Crane’s birth , the publication of The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane, by Paul Mariani & the re-publication of The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon.

A sideshow of one: Umberto Saba (Features) , December 2000, 25
A consideration of the poet and his work upon the publication of a new translation.

Posthumous impresario (Books) , September 2000, 69
A review of Last Poems: Manuscript Materials, by W. B. Yeats, edited by James Pethica.

Flypaper for ghosts (Books) , March 2000, 66
Review of Diaries 1899-1941 by Robert Musil.

Jorge Luis Borges & the plural I (Features) , November 1999, 14

Nostalgia for bad times (Letters) , May 1999, 40
On how the Czech Republic views its past

A sad & angry summa (Books) , February 1999, 64
The Triumph of Love by Geoffrey Hill

Franz Kafka & the trip to Spindelmühle (Features) , November 1998, 32
On The Castle & its translations

Proved upon the pulse (Books) , May 1998, 69
Review of Keats by Andrew Motion

Prague of a hundred towers (Books) , March 1998, 59
Review of Prague in Black & Gold by Peter Demetz




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