GREAT TOPICS OF THE WORLD : Essays by Albert Goldbarth

Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1995. 1st Edition First Thus. Hardcover. NEW - COLLECTIBLE/Fine. Text/NEW & Bright. Stated First Edition, First Thus. Gilt-embossed bi-Color boards/Fine. DJ/Fine. Essays from award winning poet Albert Goldbarth (1948 -) who gave us some 20 collections of poetry. This 193 paged collection of 4 works of prose freely blends memoir, history, short stories & myth. 1, Delft: Painter Jan Vermeer & microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek meet and their thoughts go to fleas that hopped from the biblical plague to circus history; 2, The History of the Universe Is Important to This Story: Collision of notions when astronomers Tycho Brahe & Johannes Kepler are brought together with Rabbi Yehudah Loew of Prague, presumed occultist of Golem legends, who created a clay man to protect Jews from persecution, in which, the sky-scanners' personal lives fold into Goldbarth's own memories of his mother death from cancer, and, his teenage affair with his best friend's half-sister; 3, Worlds: Tells of the struggles of Goldbarth's grandparents, Polish Jewish immigrants, on Manhattan's Lower East Side along with commonalities shared w/antics in George Herriman's Krazy Kat comics & astronomer Percival Lowell's misidentification of "canals" on Mars, plus, Hopi cosmology; and 4, Future: Goldbarth demonstrates "the future has been here a long, long, time." Wondrous, richly textured prose poems filled with this-and-that, written with humor, intelligence and grace.