Divagations: Collected Poetry 1959-1996 Annotated Edition
About this ebook
The dictionary defines "divagation" as a wandering or a digression. Therefore many of the poems in this collection evoke the author's voyages that have taken him to forty-seven countries around the world.
Divagations is also a virtual handbook of poetic forms ranging from the elegance of the Spenserian Stanza to free verse. There are ballads and ballades, odes and ottava rima, rondels and rondeaux. Like many English-language poets, the author has a fondness for the sonnet; included is a sequence of twenty-four love sonnets. He has also included three sestinas, one in French. A long, narrative poem in iambic pentameter recounts the adventures of one Poor Fisher, who travels to the Caribbean and attempts to establish a new religion with himself as its prophet.
Included in an appendix are extensive annotations by Catherine Jagor, a Paris-based poet who has known the author for over a quarter of a century and is intimately familiar with his work.
"After reading this collection, you will be changed, enriched and inspired." Jean-Pierre Collet, author of Le Chant du Naïf and Harmonies.
About the author
Ronald W. Kenyon was born and raised in Ashland, Kentucky. He was admitted to the Honors Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he studied English, French, Spanish and political science and won two Hopwood creative writing awards.
The recipient of a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, he attended graduate school at Stanford University and studied at St. Lawrence University under a National Defense Education Act scholarship. He was certified as a French-English liaison interpreter by the U.S. Department of State Office of Language Services.
During his studies as an undergraduate and in graduate school, he became familiar with the entire history of English poetry, from Anglo-Saxon alliteration to the modernism of William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound. This legacy has left its mark on his poetry. The reader will also find allusions to modern Spanish-language poets, notably Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca in Kenyon's verses.
