Description
The Deadly Shadow of the Wall: Poems
by R. W. Haynes
$19.99, Full-length, paper
979-8-88838-029-1
2022
Courageous investigators are invited to seek within this volume for clues to the following:
- Is the sonnet still alive? Is “formal” verse dead? Would Emily Dickinson whip Amado Nervo in a fair fight?
- Do the Muses of the South Georgia flatwoods sing well on the Río Bravo? What did Dr. King say to General Lee when they got to Heaven? Did Ezra Pound’s improvements of W. B. Yeats’s verse count as sabotage? Did Joseph Conrad really hate Russians?
- Which makes a better omelet, luffas or yard-long beans? When actors play actors, should members of the audience play actors, too? Did Chaucer know algebra? Did Henry VIII poison Katherine of Aragon and Cardinal Wolsey? Could Thomas J. Jackson have captured Washington in 1861? Who made it possible for Louisa Picquet to purchase her mother from Horton Foote’s great-great grandpa?
- Why did Sam Houston give up poetry? Whatever happened to Ibsen’s Bible? Whatever happened to the Colossus of Rhodes? El Cerro de San Juan? The bones of El Rey Nayar?
- Did Sir John Falstaff father several illegitimate children in Texas? Did the water of the Colorado River really test positive for a natural hallucinogen? Does Matagorda Island attract hurricanes? What did Henrik Ibsen have against ducks?
R. W. Haynes, Professor of English at Texas A&M International University, has published poetry in many journals in the United States and in other countries. As a scholar, he specializes in British Renaissance literature, and he has also taught extensively in such areas as medieval thought, Southern literature, classical poetry, and writing. Since 1992, he has offered regular graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, as well as seminars in Ibsen, Chaucer, Spenser, rhetoric, and other topics. In 2004, Haynes met Texas playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote and has since become a leading scholar of that author’s remarkable oeuvre, publishing a book on Foote’s plays in 2010 and editing a collection of essays on his works in 2016. Haynes also writes plays and fiction. In 2016, he received the SCMLA Poetry Award ($500) at the South Central Modern Language Association Conference. Three collections of his poetry have been published, Laredo Light (Cyberwit 2019), Let the Whales Escape (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Heidegger Looks at the Moon (Finishing Line Press 2021).
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