News from the Village

by Mason, David

• ISBN13: 9781597094719
• ISBN10: 1597094714
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-04-01
• Publisher: Red Hen Pr

Summary

In his twenties, an American manual laborer and poet found himself living with his beautiful wife in a village in southern Greece. Their first encounter with that country would prove an unrecoverable dream of intimate magic, but through decades of steadfast affection, poet David Mason grew to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a citizen of oners"s own country and a citizen of the world. News from the Villageis a lyrical memoir of Aegean friends, including such figures as Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Chatwin, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Yiorgos Chouliaras, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, each of whom comes fully alive, along with a brilliant cast of lesser-known characters. Fearing he has lost Greece and everything it has meant in his life, Mason goes back again and again to the country he knew as a young man. He encounters Turkey and Greece together in the shadow of 9-11, follows the lives of his friends, whose trials sometimes surpass his own, and brings them all together in the circle of this generous narrative. Ultimately, Masonrs"s memoir is about what we can hold and what slips away, what sustains us all through our griefs and disappointments. This book is richly evocative and rare.

Author Biography

David Mason’s books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals.  His first novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007, and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.  Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, Mason has co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry.  His poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in such periodicals as Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review.  He has also written the libretto for composer Lori Laitman’s opera of The Scarlet Letter.  He recently won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize for the development of a new libretto.  A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he lives near the Garden of the Gods with his wife, Anne Lennox.

Table of Contents

The Lotos-Eaters	p. 11
Greek Fever	p. 35
Getting to Know Michali	p. 59
Chatwin's Ashes	p. 87
Learning By Default	p. 109
Holding to Life	p. 131
The End of Immortality	p. 145
Another Kind of Greece	p. 167
In Katerina's Kitchen	p. 183
Back in the Village	p. 215
The Other Side	p. 237
The Muezzin and the Dove	p. 255
Wine Among Friends	p. 277
Postscript	p. 303
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