Divagations: Collected Poetry 1959-1996 Annotated Edition (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781477470619)

"After reading this collection, you will be changed, enriched and inspired." Jean-Pierre Collet, author of Le Chant du Naïf and Harmonies.

The seventy-nine poems in this collection--from four lines to six pages in length--were composed over a period of almost forty years and can be considered episodes of a memoir, an autobiography in verse documenting the author's life, loves and travels.

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 globe.

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; among them is a sequence of twenty-four love sonnets dedicated to a mysterious Rosalind. Kenyon also includes three sestinas, two in English, one in French.

Two long, narrative poems in iambic pentameter recount the adventures of one Poor Fisher, who travels to the Caribbean and attempts to establish a new religion with himself as its prophet and a Major Cabbage, obsessed with everything Hellenic, past and present. This second narrative was written in 1967 and lost until 2020 when it was discovered in Kenyon's archives and included in the present edition.

Ronald W. Kenyon studied English literature at the University of Michigan and Stanford and 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 entire legacy has left its mark on his poetry. The reader will also find allusions to modern Spanish-language poets, notably Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Lorca.

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.


Author: Ronald W. Kenyon
ISBN-10: 1477470611
ISBN-13: 9781477470619
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Language: English
Published: 06/19/2012
Pages: 146
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.31d