Overview

In A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, poetry becomes a lens through which to explore the complex, visionary world of William Blake. Drawing on Blake’ s own rejection of tradition and his relentless quest to challenge the boundaries of art, Geoffrey Babbitt confronts the tensions between genius and convention, life and death, light and dark. Each poem in this collection inhabits a moment of Blake's life, offering a vivid glimpse into his unique perspective - a perspective that rejected the normative for the transformative power of imagination. From his visionary watercolors to his provocative views on oil painting, these poems draw readers into Blake's world, where reality and the unseen converge in prismatic intensity. A Grain of Sand in Lambeth is an invitation to experience the world through Blake's eyes - a world where imagination reigns supreme and art is a living force.

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9781647792053

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Reviews

""Transcending both the act of homage and the scope of retrospective, A Grain of Sand in Lambeth forwards the visionary and profoundly humane purposes of William Blake into our present distress. This is a book of passions and of passionate challenges. Babbitt's poems rise to those challenges, moving Blake's purposes into our contemporary idiom and attention, there to affirm the divine spark that must be kindled again and now if justice and environmental sanity are to be realized. That poetry is capable of such an affirmation is in itself a reason to rejoice."" --Donald Revell, professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, author of The English Boat ""A visionary with visions, Geoffrey Babbitt takes up the task of slowly traipsing through the shadow lives and illuminations and hauntings of William Blake. To read and witness the dazzling arrangement of philosophy and prose and poetry in A Grain of Sand in Lambeth is like seeing the artist carefully carve and polish the written world one slow sliver at a time. It almost feels like spying, eavesdropping; in other words, this volume tucks us deep into the mystery of emergence and, ultimately, disappearance. I am grateful for these forays into Babbitt's brilliant dark."" --Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt & Between ""In this brilliant and impressive collection, Geoffrey Babbitt brings William Blake's mythic poems into the twenty-first century with grace, gratitude, and beauty. Yes, ""...this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain,"" and Babbitt's poems illuminate this through wild wanderings and stunning observations. Babbitt's poems remind me of Blake's: they show us that Heaven is not simply a destination. Rather, perfection dwells in perception. It lives in the divine act of taking in the world, when we can, before we're gone."" --Adam Clay, author of Circle Back ""Geoffrey Babbitt adds to the small but growing canon of anarcho-scholastic criticism with this wonderful volume focusing on William Blake. Part biography, part ekphrasis, all rapture--a fitting engagement to the inexplicable coruscating genius of Blake that paints the clearest picture of his time and his work."" --Kazim Ali, author of Sukun

Author Information

Geoffrey Babbitt's poems and essays have appeared in North American Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ben Jonson Journal, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Guesthouse, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA and a PhD from the University of Utah, is an associate professor of English and creative writing and writing and rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and serves as editor in chief of Seneca Review and Seneca Review Books, for which he cofounded the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. He is the author of Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light.

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