Apples from Shinar (1959, 2011)
On October 15, 2011, Wesleyan University Press released a special centenary edition of Hyam Plutzik’s critically acclaimed collection, Apples from Shinar, which was his second complete collection.
Originally published in 1959 as a part of Wesleyan’s newly minted poetry series, Apples from Shinar is Plutzik's second complete collection, containing 32 lyric poems. The title refers to the Mesopotamian region where Jews had settled in ancient times.
The collection includes “The Shepherd”—a section of the book-length poem “Horatio,” which earned Plutzik a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize. “The love and the words and the simplicity” that mark Plutzik’s poetry, writes Philip Booth, “are all here [in Apples from Shinar], and the poems come peacefully, and wonderfully, alive.” With a previously unpublished foreword by Hyam Plutzik and a new afterword by David Scott Kastan, the 2011 edition marks the centenary of Plutzik’s birth and will introduce a new generation of readers to the work of one of the best mid-century American poets.
Apples from Shinar was one of the finalists considered for the Pulitzer Prize in 1960.
Table of Contents
Because the Red Osier Dogwood
The Dream About our Master, William Shakespeare
To My Daughter
I am Disquieted When I see Many Hills
As the Great Horse Rots on the Hill
If Causality is Impossible, Genesis is Recurrent
The Premonition
Jim Desterland
After Looking Into a Book Belonging to My Great-Grandfather, Eli Eliakim Plutzik
The Mythos of Samuel Huntsman
Beware, Saunterer, of this Desperado, a Mr. Bones, a Bad Actor
The Airman Who Flew Over Shakespeare's England
The Priest Ekranath
I Imagined a Painter Painting Such a World
The Bass
The Importance of Poetry, or The Coming Forth From Eternity into Time
Winter, Never Mind Where
The Zero That Is All
For T.S.E. Only
A New Explanation of the Quietude and Talkativeness of Trees
Portrait
Requiem for Edward Carrigh
And in the 51st Year of That Century, While My Brother Cried in the Trench, While my Enemy Glared from the Cave
Man and Tree
Of Objects Considered as Fortresses in a Baleful Space
A Philosopher on a Mountain in Scythia
Trio for Two Voices and a Woodwind
The Mythos of the Man from Enoch
The Milkman
