Moonbook and Sunbook

$19.95

by Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone’s new volume of poetry offers two sequences paired, pivoting on lunar and solar consciousness and comprised mostly of multiplying sonnets, two per page and mirrored typographically across the page-spreads. Elegant in erudition but always fluently conversational, this book is an homage to the poet’s father and moving proof of an astonishingly productive life in letters.

by Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone’s new volume of poetry offers two sequences paired, pivoting on lunar and solar consciousness and comprised mostly of multiplying sonnets, two per page and mirrored typographically across the page-spreads. Elegant in erudition but always fluently conversational, this book is an homage to the poet’s father and moving proof of an astonishingly productive life in letters.

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About the Author

Willis Barnstone, born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, the Sorbonne, Columbia and Yale, taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and in China during Cultural Revolution, where he was later a Fulbright Professor in Beijing (1984-85). Former O’Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.

A Guggenheim fellow, he has received the NEA, NEH, Emily Dickinson Award of the PSA, Auden Award of NY Council on the Arts, Midland Authors Award, four Book of the Month selections, four Pulitzer nominations, and Lanner Poetry Award for Border of a Dream: The Poems of Antonio Machado (Copper Canyon)

Advanced Praise

“The book is a tour de force of sonnets, an exciting elaboration and revitalization of the form. Again and again, we meet our old sonnet friend, and it takes us a minute to recognize him… We are lucky, through these poems, to enter into a cosmic vision of life that embraces joy and sorrow, flesh and spirit, human and divine.” — David Lee Garrison, New Letters

“Willis Barnstone’s Moonbook and Sunbook is a magical affirmation of our human presence in the vast expanse of the universe. In this book, Barnstone proves that as lowly humans contemplating those cosmic bodies nearest to us—the sun and the moon—we may find an energy that feeds the human hunger for meaning in the face of death. In this extended meditation upon solar and lunar complexities, we are invited to merge the wonder of the self with the even greater enigma of the universe, and by doing so, to transcend the human condition.” — Sonja James, The Journal of West Virginia

“Willis Barnstone’s new book is a magnetic miracle that draws the solar and lunar magic of his immense learning into the space of marvelous poems. His language joins the mysteries of the sky with the enigmas of the heart in a music unmistakably his own.” — Andrei Codrescu

“Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman’s Leaves, Herman Melville’s Whales, the Sonnets of Barnstone’s Secret Reader … and my daily Corn Flakes—that rough poetry of morning.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“(Barnstone’s) thought is of course the core, but with it come tones and over-tones, undertones even, from the poets whom he has so brilliantly, so sensitively translated from many languages. Their voices are there with his, with the poet who has such an ear for language that no subtlety escapes it.” — James Laughlin

“Barnstone has been appointed a special angel to bring ‘the other’ to our attention … He illuminates the spirit for us, and he clarifies the unclarifiable … I think he does it by beating his wings.” — Gerald Stern

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-42-4