Bücher veröffentlicht von Crescent Moon Publishing

BEAUTIES, BEASTS AND ENCHANTMENT: CLASSIC FRENCH FAIRY TALES Edited and translated by Jack Zipes A beautiful new collection of 36 French fairy tales translated into English by renowned writer and authority on fairy tales, Jack Zipes. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Sleepy Beauty, Puss In Boots, Bluebeard, and Little Red Riding Hood are some of the classic fairy tales in this amazing book. There are many stories here by Charles Perrault, the most famous author of French conte de fées. Features a new introduction by editor Jack Zipes. Includes a generous number of exquisite illustrations from fairy tale collections. This is a clothbound edition, with gold letters embossed on a blue cloth cover, and a colour flyleaf. 'Terrific... a succulent array of 17th and 18th century 'salon' fairy tales' - The New York Times Book Review 'These tales are adventurous, thrilling in a way fairy tales are meant to be... The translation from the French is modern, happily free of archaic and hyperbolic language... a fine and sophisticated collection' - New York Tribune 'Enjoyable to read... a unique collection of French regional folklore' - Library Journal 'Charming stories accompanied by attractive pen-and-ink drawings' - Chattanooga Times 'An excellent collection' - Booklist. REVIEW FROM AMAZON: If you love fairy tales and felt some were lacking you will love this book. With two versions of Beauty and the Beast, one covering the true details of the prince's curse and fairy politics, and several classic style french stories, it will quickly become a family favorite. JACK ZIPES is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools and has worked with children's theaters in Europe and the United States. Some of Jack Zipes' major publications include Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (1979), Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983, rev. ed. 2006), Don't Bet On the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England (1986), The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988), Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (2000), Speaking Out: Storytelling and Creative Drama For Children (2004), Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller (2005), and Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (2006). Jack Zipes has also translated The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987) and edited The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (2000), and The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (2001). Most recently he has translated and edited The Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitre (2008) and Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales (2008) by Kurt Schwitters. Includes illustrations and a new introduction. ISBN 97818617145498. 612 pages. www.crmoon.com

TWILIGHT IN ITALY by D.H. LAWRENCE A new edition of the travel book that D.H. Lawrence wrote about his travels in Germany, Italy and the Alps. Twilight In Italy is one of Lawrence's most lyrical and upbeat books, an enchanting account of travelling around Europe. Illustrated with paintings by J.M.W. Turner. EXTRACT FROM THE PASSAGE WHERE D.H. LAWRENCE IS AT LAKE GARDA I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my soul shrank. I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to distil me into Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great, pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky. www.crmoon.com

THREE ROMANTIC POETS: EMILY BRONTE, JOHN KEATS, PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEYSELECTED POEMSEdited and introduced by L.M. Poole Three great Romantics poets are featured in this anthology - Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Emily Bronte. The book includes all of their famous poems. Emily Bronte as a poet is still neglected today. Her novel Wuthering Heights, however, remains one of the great English novels. It continues to sell, continues to be adapted for radio, theatre, film and television, continues to inspire readers and be cited by critics. The wind whistling through the heather in Winter is indeed the atmosphere of Wuthering Heights, and also of Bronte's poetry. In poem after poem we find loving evocations of the moors: we hear of 'the breezy moor' (in "The starry night shall tidings bring"), the 'flowerless moors' (in "How still, how happy! Those are words"), and of 'the moors where the linnet was trilling/ Its song on the old granite stone' (in "Loud without the wind was roaring", the most powerful of Bronte's moor-poems). John Keats is one of the few British poets who is truly ecstatic and wild. Despite the overly-ornate language, the often awkward phrases ('made sweet moan' in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'), despite the Romantic indulgences and the sometimes chauvinist views, the often over-simplification of natural and human processes and experiences, and despite the tendency to gush and exaggerate, Keats is one of the few poets who write in English who is truly furious and shamanic. This book gathers the most potent passages from John Keats together, including the famous 'Odes', the sonnets, the luxuriously sensuous 'Eve of St Agnes', the mysterious and atmospheric 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', and extracts from 'Lamia', Endymion and Hyperion. Percy Shelley is one of the major British poets, seen by many people as the breathless, hyper-lyrical, angelic yet anarchic poet of the Romantic era, out-doing Lord Byron and John Keats in terms of sheer brilliance. His personality, as with Keats and Byron, is a crucial component in the Shelley legend. Shelley has a cult built up around him. The book includes a selection of Shelley's odes, hymns and paeans of England's breathless, angelic, anarchic poet. Famous poems, such as 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'The Cloud', are set beside extracts from Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion. With an introduction and bibliography for each poet. Plus a portrait gallery for each poet. www.crmoon.com.

DANTE ALIGHIERI: THE VITA NUOVA Translated by Thomas OkeyEdited and introduced by Joanna Finn-Kelcey Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova is his 'Book of Memory', the poetic account of his love for Beatrice Portinari. It is one of the great poetry books of love in world literature. The Vita Nuova or New Life draws on (and is part of) the dolce stil novo, the 'sweet style' of Italian poets such as Guido Cavalcanti, Guido Guinicelli, Cino da Pistoia and other stilnovisti. Dante was an admirer of love poetry (he praised Arnaut Daniel in the Divina Commedia). Among the influences on the Vita Nuova are, of course, the Bible (in particular the Psalms, the Song of Songs, Jeremiah's Lamentations and Christ's Passion). Other influences, apart from Classical thinkers, are Aelred of Rievaulx's De spirituali amicitia, and Peter of Blois's Deamicitia christiana. Classical and earlier writers whom Dante read included Cicero (De amicitia) and Boethius (De consolatione). The Vita Nouva, though, stands on its own in mediaeval literature. There is nothing else quite like it. Whereas Peter Abelard produced 'passionate self-exculpation' and Boethius was facing death, Dante wrote a creative autobiography, a record of his love and creative life up until the year 1294. Dante first met Beatrice at a party given by her father Folco Portinari, the Florentine banker, on Mayday, 1274. He was nearly nine; she was nearly eight. She was wearing a red dress, and was known as Bice, a shortened form of Beatrice. The Vita Nuova relates the Dante-poet's experience of Beatrice in 25 sonnets, ballata, three canzoni and two incomplete canzoni consisting of one stanza and two stanzas in length. The Vita Nuova was the first book to link together poems and a prose commentary of an autobiographical and critical nature. The mixture of prose and poetry was known in mediaeval times as a prosimetrum narrative. Includes the Italian text and an English translation, plus a new gallery of art featuring Dante Alighieri, an introduction and bibliography. Also available as an E- book. www.crmoon.com

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: COMPLETE POEMS This book features all of William Shakespeare's poetry, including the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and The Passionate Pilgrim. Each poem is printed on its own on the page, without footnotes and annotations. Includes a new gallery of many illustrations of Shakespeare and his art, and a bibliography of references. 356 pages. Includes a bibliography of references. This is from 'The Passionate Pilgrim': Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, That like two spirits do suggest me still; My better angel is a man right fair, My worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side, And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, Wooing his purity with her fair pride. And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend, Suspect I may, yet not directly tell: For being both to me, both to each friend, I guess one angel in another's hell; The truth I shall not know, but live in doubt, Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE SONNETS The Sonnets represent the highpoint of love poetry in English: they continue to astonish and delight with the abundance of their word play and the intensity of the erotic feelings they depict. This book prints all of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and provides a commentary on this narrative of rivalry in love. ¿  The Sonnets are central to William Shakespeare's art. They display Shakespeare's poetic talent at its height. The Sonnets are the great love poem sequence in British poetry, as well as being the longest single group of English Renaissance sonnets. They rival in grandeur, skill and cleverness the poetic sequence from which they ultimately derive (via Sir Thomas Wyatt): Francesco Petrarch's Rime Sparse. In Shakespeare's Sonnets, introspection and self-analysis is as rigorous as in Petrarch's Canzoniere, but Shakespeare's bitterness and sense of irony is more deeply ingrained than in Petrarch's poems. Shakespeare's Sonnets came late in the development of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence. They are decadent, late efforts of an already (by the 1590s) old-fashioned poetic form. Yet Shakespeare manages to infuse the sonnet sequence with an extraordinary power and magic. The Sonnets, indeed, contain some of the most marvellous moments in any (English) poetry. The magnificence of the opening lines of the Sonnets, for instance, is undeniable: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (18.1) Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy (33.1-4) Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all (40.1) Sweet love, renew thy force (56.1) Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments: love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. (116.1-4) My love is as a fever, longing still (147.1) Each poem is printed on its own on the page, without footnotes and annotations. Includes new illustrations of Shakespeare and his art, an introduction, notes on certain sonnets, and a bibliography of references. www.crmoon.com

JOHN KEATS: POEMS OF 1820 Edited with an introduction by Miriam Chalk. Includes notes by M. Robertson, and a new gallery of images, including many paintings illustrating Keats' poetry. This is the book published in 1820 by John Keats (1795-1821). It includes some famous 'Odes', the luxuriously sensuous 'Eve of St Agnes', and the longer poems 'Lamia' and 'Hyperion'. John Keats is one of the few British poets who is truly ecstatic and wild. Keats is known for his ornate language, memorable phrases ('made sweet moan' in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'), Romantic indulgences, and a tendency to gush and exaggerate. Keats is one of a few poets who write in English in a shamanic manner. John Keats reaches the pinnacle of British poetry, as W. Jackson Bate, typical among critics, says: 'the language of his greatest poetry has always held an attraction; for there we reach, if only for a brief while, a high plateau where in mastery of phrase he has few equals in English poetry, and only one obvious superior.' Like Arthur Rimbaud, and like the poet he is most compared with, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats burnt fiercely and died young. He is a poet as martyr and hero, a Vincent van Gogh of poesie. He is famous for his sensual odes - 'Ode to a Grecian Urn', 'Ode to Melancholy', 'To Autumn', 'Ode to Psyche' and 'Ode to a Nightingale' - the poems 'Lamia', 'Endymion' and 'Hyperion', the luxuriant 'The Eve of St Agnes', a group of sonnets, and the strange, haunting fairy tale poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'. John Keats is a typical Romantic poet: he used pagan imagery; he employs much ancient Greek mythology; he  is a shamanic poet, who writes in feverish bouts; he is a 'poet's poet'; he wrote searing short poems, and attempted long, epic sequences; he revered the right authors (John Milton, William Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks); he died young; and he travelled to Italy, the key destination for the authentic Grand Tour experience.    British Poets Series. Illustrated, with new images for this edition. Bibliography and notes. 224 pages. www.crmoon.com

EDMUND SPENSER: HEAVENLY LOVE: SELECTED POEMSA selection of the great poems by Edmund Spenser. Edmund Spenser created a drama of England in his poetry. The 'dream' occurs throughout his poetry, but finds its most concentrated expression in The Faerie Queene, with its epic treatment of the 'dream of Albion', a myth-making vision of Blighty as the expression of Elizabeth I's magnificence, and vice versa. The Faerie Queene is an astonishing work, by any standards, and it dwarfs, at times, even those other creations of the Renaissance that are so revered by readers and critics - Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, William Shakespeare's plays and Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. Technically, Edmund Spenser knew everything about poetry. He wrote many sonnets, and in his The Faerie Queene he composed hundreds of nine-line stanzas. There is a stately progress to Spenser's poesie: he did not rush things. He took his time. William Wordsworth spoke of the 'Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven with the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace'. In the Amoretti, is cycle of love sonnets, Spenser tackled his target, his beloved, from many directions. Spenser is unsurpassed in the art of poetic exaltation - no other poet of the era - and of subsequent or previous eras - Spenser's sense of the superlative and the exalted. Spenser's poetry is a litany of paeans: 'Epithalamion', 'A Hymn in Honour of Love', 'A Hymn in Honour of Beauty', 'A Hymn of Heavenly Beauty', 'A Hymn of Heavenly Love', 'Prothalamion', 'The Calendar' and of course The Faerie Queene all contain passages of lyrical praise. As with William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser's view of the world was crystallized in his poetry is an expansive, dramatic, encyclopaedic vision. The sheer amount of work by Spenser - the copious letters, 'Complaints', 'Hymns', sonnets, and stanzas in The Faerie Queene - attest to his love of writing. The length of The Faerie Queene is not the least astonishing thing about it. Spenser clearly had a lot to say, and would not stop until he had said it. Illustrated, with a revised text, and introduction and notes. This edition contains a new gallery of pictures of Spenser and his art. British Poets Series. www.crmoon.com

THE CRESCENT MOON BOOK OF METAPHYSICAL POETRYEdited and introduced by Charlotte Greene. With a new picture gallery, and additional poems for this edition. All of the major and many of the minor Metaphysical poets are featured in this anthology, including: John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Sir William Davenant, the Countess of Sidney Godolphin, Richard Crashaw, John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, Richard Lovelace, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Stanley. The Metaphysical poetic style is witty, learned, subjective, sensual, intellectual, reflective, philosophical, baroque, intense, and sometimes ecstatic. Metaphysical poetry was passion and emotion modified by intellect/  ('passionate ratiocination' Herbert Grierson called it), while T.S. Eliot described John Donne's poetry as experience modified by (his) sensibility. Helen Gardener said that Metaphysical verse was 'an expanded epigram', and Margaret Willy called it 'feeling thought'. Metaphysical poetry used satire and irony, as well as the new science (biology, mathematics, cosmology and microcosmic emphasis). It is a poetry concerned with living for the present, with philosophical and religious subjects - with, in short, the soul. It is a dramatic poetry, essentially lyrical, often rough at the edges, with a love of individualized verse forms and writing poems as long as needed to be. After the adherence to traditional stanzas of Elizabethan poetry (the sonnet being the most obvious type), the Metaphysical poets employed a wide variety of forms and metrical patterns. Thomas Traherne for example, wrote in a new verse form each time he composed a poem. Poets such as Vaughan, Traherne and Marvell give the impression of writing until they've finished what they wanted to say. Their poetic forms were open - a short line here, an extended stanza there, as the subject required. Metaphysical poetry was partly 'Classical', partly 'Christian' and partly 'religious'; it was partly humanist, partly Cavalier and partly Elizabethan. John Donne, for example, was just as much Elizabethan, post-Petrarchan, Renaissance and 'Classical' as 'Metaphysical'. Some critics separate the Metaphysical poets' love poems from their religious ones. The distinction may be useful, but it is not how poets write. The boundaries between profane/ sacred, love/ religion, secular/ divine is not that clearly marked by the poets themselves. The 'religious' poems of the Metaphysical poets are often their most erotic. They write of God, the beloved, and their relationship to him, in erotic terms. In poems such as 'The World', for example, Henry Vaughan narrates the old notion of the soul mystically married to the Bridegroom (God). With an introduction and bibliography. The text has been revised for this edition, with new poems added. Includes a new picture gallery. Also available in an E-book edition. www.crmoon.com.

THE CRESCENT MOON BOOK OF MYSTICAL POETRYEdited and introduced by Carol Appleby The mystical poets featured here include William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Crashaw, Percy Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Herbert, Longfellow, Gerald Hopkins, Thomas Traherne, William Shakespeare, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, D.H. Lawrence and anonymous mediaeval works,  such as The Cloud of Unknowing. The mystical poetry in English in this book takes in pantheism in nature poetry (in the work of Wordsworth, Whitman, Coleridge and Keats), as well the more orthodox Christian poetry (in the poesie of Donne, and Traherne). Although most of the writers here are British, the book includes some American writers: Henry Longfellow, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is the grand master of pantheistic poetry, a truly abundant poet, one of the most exuberant voices in poetry. He simply could not stop himself from writing like a flood. Many mystical poets are like this: the experience ignites them, and sets the words flowing. Some mystics and mystical poets write long works, in order to circumscribe their experience (think of St John of the Cross, or Meister Eckhart, Dante Alighieri or William Wordsworth). With an introduction and bibliography. The text has been revised for this edition, with new poems added. Includes a new gallery of poets. Also available in an E-book edition. www.crmoon.com.

THE CRESCENT MOON BOOK OF ROMANTIC POETRYEdited and introduced by L.M. Poole The great Romantics poets are featured in this anthology - William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Emily Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Clare - as well as many lesser-known women poets. New poems have been added for this edition, plus a new gallery of portraits of poets. FROM THE INTRODUCTION The Romantic poets wrote some of the greatest nature poetry in world literature, as the poems collected here demonstrate. Coleridge's poetry, for instance, was very sensitive to weather; his depressions would either result in rheumatism or poetry. Much of Lord Byron's 'Childe Harold' was concerned with lyrical descriptions of exotic landscapes. The elemental powers of nature are very much to the fore in poems such as William Cowper's 'To the Nightingale', Charlotte Smith's 'To the South Downs' and 'Beachy Head', William Blake's 'Night', Mary Robinson's 'Written After Successive Nights of Melancholy Dream', Helen Maria Williams' 'Sonnet: To the Torrid Zone', Barbara Hoole's Ullswater sonnet, much of the poetry of John Clare and Emily Brontë, and of course the king of Romantic nature poetry, William Wordsworth (in poems such as 'Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey', 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', 'I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud' and of course 'The Prelude'). With an introduction and bibliography. The text has been revised for this edition, with new poems added. Plus a portrait gallery of poets. Also available in an e-book edition. www.crmoon.com.

FRIEDRICH HOLDERLIN: HOLDERLIN'S SONGS OF LIGHT: SELECTED POEMS Translated by Michael Hamburger and edited and introduced by Jeremy Mark Robinson The German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843) is one of the very greatest poets - of any era. Holderlin's poetry is airy, radiant and incredibly lyrical. This selection features many of his best odes, poems and hymns, from the whole span of his career. Michael Hamburger is a respected poet and critic. He has translated Rilke, Celan and Goethe, among others, as well the whole of Holderlin's poetry. Hamburger's awards include The Schlegel-Tieck Prize, the Goethe Medal and the European Translation Prize. 'Few can have done more to enhance (and in many cases create) the appreciation of German poetry among an Anglophone audience' (Times Literary Supplement) ¿  Includes the German text and English translations. The book has been revised. Illustrated, with images of Holderlin and biographical pictures. With introduction and bibliography. European Writers Series.  Notes & bibliography & illustrations. www.crmoon.com Friedrich Holderlin was born Johann Friedrich Holderlin on March 20, 1770 in Lauffen, a Swabian town on the River Neckar. He spent much of his later years, following a mental breakdown, in a house in Tubingen, until his death in 1843. For Ronald Peacock, Holderlin was the poet of 'radiant purity', 'the one whose name can be uttered only in the tone of veneration'. The chief love in Friedrich Holderlin's life was Susette Borkenstein Gontard (1769-1802), the 'beautiful, cultured and noble' wife of a Frankfurt banker, J.F. Gontard. Holderlin taught Gontard's children. He idealized Susette Gontard: she became his Muse, the Diotima in his poetry. 'Schones Leben! du lebst, wie die zarten Bluthen im Winter', Holderlin wrote in 'To Diotima'. Just as Novalis worshipped his beloved Sophie as an embodiment of Sophia (Wisdom), a Goddess of transcendent philosophy, so Holderlin apostrophized Susette Gontard as Diotima in poems such as 'Diotima', 'To Diotima', 'To Her Genius' and 'Menon's Lament for Diotima'. Diotima was the hero's beloved in Holderlin's novel Hyperion. Many poems are addressed to Diotima, and she is the subject of many pieces. It was with his relationship with Susette Gontard that Holderlin's poetry began to develop rapidly, achieving a depth and lyricism far beyond the early poems. Susette, as Diotima, was crucial in this poetic development.

Mel Brooks: Genius and Loving ItFreedom and Liberation in the Cinema of Mel Brooksby Thomas A. Christie Beloved by his fans and equally praised and derided by the critics many times throughout his long career, Mel Brooks is a creative polymath, a comic talent to be reckoned with - influential, fearless and totally unafraid of his detractors. Yet whether you admire his work or not, one thing remains absolutely certain: this larger-than-life character is a very difficult man to ignore. Mel Brooks has been immortalised as the definitive maestro of big-screen bad taste, a pioneer of the cinematic spoof (and very influential, too - you can see Brooks' influence in many places today). But throughout his film-making career, his ardent championship of personal liberty is too often neglected. Examining all eleven of the movies that Brooks directed, from The Producers (1968) to Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), this book examines the way that this most distinctive of cinematic visionaries came to earnestly and vigourously defend freedom in all of its forms, whether creative, individual, social, cultural or political. As well as famous films like The Producers ('If you've got it, flaunt it, baby!'), Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein ('Frankenstein?' 'Fronkensteen'), this book also looks at lesser-known Brooks movies such as 12 Chairs, Silent Movie and Life Stinks. Includes a detailed filmography, movie statistics, examples of critical opinions, a guide to further reading, and a bibliography. Fully illustrated, with stills from all of Mel Brooks' movies. ISBN 9781861715203. 404 pages. www.crmoon.com 'Thomas Christie's scholarship is as always immaculate. Full marks to him for another informative, well written and erudite guide to a neglected director and episode of film history.' (Review of John Hughes and Eighties Cinema) Douglas J. Allen (Lecturer in Social Sciences, Motherwell College)

THE ROMANCE OF LUST by Anonymous The Romance of Lust is a clasic novel of English erotica, first published in 1873-76. The Romance of Lust relates the sexual adventures of Charlie Roberts in Victorian England. This edition includes ilustrations of erotic art from the 1870s period of the book. Illustrated. 452pp. ISBN 9781861713629. www.crmoon.com

LAND ART IN THE U.S.A. A new study of land art in America, featuring all of the well-known land artists from the ¿golden age¿ of land art - the 1960s - to the present day. Fully illustrated, with a bibliography. EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON ROBERT SMITHSON Robert Smithson is the key land artist, the premier artist in the world of land art. And he¿s been a big favourite with art critics since the early Seventies. Smithson was the chief mouthpiece of American earth/ site æsthetics, and is probably the most important artist among all land artists. For Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Tony Smith were ¿the more compelling artists today, concerned with ¿Place¿ or ¿Site¿¿. Smithson was impressed by Tony Smith¿s vision of the mysterious aspects of a dark unfinished road and called Smith ¿the agent of endlessness¿. Smith¿s æsthetic became part of Smithson¿s view of art as a complete ¿site¿, not simply an æsthetic of sculptural objects. Smithson was not inspired by ancient religious sculpture, by burial mounds, for example, so much as by decayed industrial sites. He visited some in the mid-1960s that were ¿in some way disrupted or pulverized¿. He said he was looking for a ¿denaturalization rather than built up scenic beauty¿. Robert Smithson said he was concerned, like many land (and contemporary artists with the thing in itself, not its image, its effect, its critical significance: ¿I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation¿. Smithson¿s theory of the ¿non-site¿ was based on ¿absence, a very ponderous, weighty absence¿. Smithson proposed a theory of a dialectic between absence and presence, in which the ¿non-site¿ and ¿site¿ are both interacting. In the ¿non-site¿ work, presence and absence are there simultaneously. ¿The land or ground from the Site is placed in the art (Non-Site) rather than the art is placed on the ground. The Non-Site is a container within another container ¿ the room¿. William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas¿s books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.