I am enrolled with Amazon books to be notified of the publication of any
new books under the subjects I have listed. I have just been notified
of the new book below. The remarks about it are by the publisher. It
is a few dollars cheaper than list from Amazon. I have ordered it
myself, and if you want to wait for a personal appraisal I'll be happy
to give it after I receive the book.
Sylvia Edwards
Huntsville, AL
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"Sea Shells" by Paul Valery, Ralph Manheim, Henri Mondur,Mary Oliver
List: $18.00
Publisher: Beacon Press
Binding: Hardcover, 96 pages
Expected publication date: June 1998
Dimensions (in inches): 0.59 x 8.80 x 5.66
ISBN: 0807064300
The publisher, Beacon Press , 05/14/98:
A beautifully illustrated gift for literary nature lovers "I look for
the first time at this thing I have found. . . . And I am perplexed.
Then I ask myself the question: who made this?"
This is the question posed by the French poet-philosopher Paul Valéry in
his engaging meditation on the aesthetics of the sea shell. As any
beachcomber will attest, sea shells are an endless source of fascination
and delight, and Valéry’s 1936 essay glows, as Gaston Bachelard says,
with his sense of nature’s “transcendental geometry.” Wondering at the
enormous variety of shells—the helices, the spirals, the surfaces smooth
or encrusted with knobs or spines, the bulbs and concavities, the rugged
outsides and the satiny surfaces within—Valéry compares the “making” of
human beings with that slow, continuous formation that is the “making”
of nature.
Beautifully illustrated with Henri Mondor’s pencil drawings from the
1937 edition, this is a book that will be cherished by all lovers of
nature and literature who are engaged by the marvelous abundance of the
natural world and eager to revisit “those questions that arise in us
before we remember that we are not newborn.”
Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was one of the major poets of the twentieth
century. His extensive writings in prose range from literary theory and
criticism to social and political commentary.
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