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Paul Mariani
Paul Mariani has published six poetry collections including
Deaths And Transfigurations (2005). He is the biographer of
William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Hart
Crane. He holds a Chair in English at Boston College, is the
former poetry editor for America magazine and published Gerard
Manley Hopkins, A Life in 2008 (Viking/Penguin). |
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Somehow
Sean O’Leary has taken Hopkins’s lyrics—among
the greatest written in any language in the past 200 years—and
turned them with his alchemist’s hand into a medley of music
of the very first order. Every song on this album—from the
Wreck of the Deutschland to the curtal sonnet Pied Beauty is a surprise
and a deep delight. You feel that line after line of Hopkins’s
profoundly spiritual poetry has been somehow wedded to an electric
and lyrical genius, the abrupt self of the poet flashing forth through
the lyricist’s profoundly apt renditions. The result is not
just beautifully modulated sound, but something like the cry of
the poet breaking forth into our world in note after note, in word
after sensuous, heartbreaking, God-saturated word. O’Leary
has done what I never thought I would hear: a wonderfully new, electrically
charged version of the poet dearest to the heart of many of us.
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© Paul Mariani 2006 |
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