Paul Legault’s The Tower

Description

The Tower by Paul Legault (Coach House Books, paperback)

Publication Date: April 14, 2020

Publisher Marketing: “The Tower is a ‘translation of W. B. Yeats’s The Tower–an homage and reinvention of the poet’s greatest work. Whereas Yeats’s book contended with his mortality as an aging spiritualist Irish Senator, this version contends with a new mortality: ours.

The poems in this collection crystallize the transition from Legault’s late twenties to his early thirties, situated in North America during a time of political upheaval. It takes each of Yeats’s poems as a starting point and queers them. It translates Yeats’s modernist urge, on the other side of a long century.

In her review of The Tower, Virginia Woolf says Yeats has ‘never written more exactly and more passionately.’ One might imagine she’d conclude the same here. You can’t fault these poems for lacking passion.”

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