Cook (late comparative literature, English and classics, Brown U.) published more that 20 books of criticism and 12 volumes of poetry. This collection of his essays that also works as a coherent volume addresses the contexts of Beckett (including minimalism, silence and the representation of passion and power), parallels and dissimilarities between Gertrude Stein and Deixis, the bread and twist of the referent after Oldon and Celan, the continued mutual and separate energies of Pound and Williams, the rise of the sense of sound creating a new music in poetry, metrical inventions of Zukofsky and Merwin, literary representations of the self, the relative impact of images and the preoccupation with image of Yeats as well as Pound and Eliot, Mallarm̌'s philosophy, Wallace Stevens's French mutations, Ashbery's disjunction and nostalgia in narrative, and disjunction and fusion in modern literature and art. Annotation 2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
