James Scully
Works“James Scully’s splendid new book, Donatello’s Version, is a social poetry which arises not from opinionation and facile protest, but from clear-eyed witness, hope, and saeva indignatio. His art is impatient of art, yet handsomely honed and phrased; it demands that we see and face injustice, and it assails—often through mockery—our compromises and complicities. Of many strong poems in this collection, I think that ‘Babble’ is a work of exceptional power.”—Richard Wilbur “Poems as they should be written—impatiently, impassionedly, intelligently, impertinently. Our daily language remade by a revered craftsman into quick images and sharp-tongued speech against harmful pretenses and imperial cruelty. Work by a line master. . . the smartest, most urgent, most actual poetry we have.” —F.D. Reeve "James Scully's new book of poems, Donatello's Version, is searing, incendiary. These poems are written in the great tradition of engaged literature, following in the footsteps of such masters as Neruda, Hikmet, and Thomas McGrath. Whether it's describing the overwhelming universal cry for justice or waxing eloquent over Abu Ghraib, Scully's verse burns. This is the real thing, about the real world, make no mistake about it."—Chris Faatz, Powell’s Books "['Listening to Coltrane'] sets the tone, even the range of the book: the impassioned search for beauty in our lives should be absolutely non-negotiable, but the search is inextricably tangled up in (or sublimated by) the fight for justice in this, our “cosmic exile.” The poem captures – or intimates – the haunting beauty of Coltrane because it casts the music in our history, which is where we actually hear it . . ."--Jon Andersen, The Cafe Review Santiago Poems
"By the time of Scully's arrrival in Chile, the Pinochet-led junta had already crushed the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. Though conditions favorable to the oligarchy and the transnationals had been reintroduced and 'dreams of paradise' nightmarishly shattered, Scully insists on addressing reality without mythology or sentimentality: 'If we had wings, roots, petals / we would not be men.' That he presents the exploited in the wide range of their complexity is one of the strengths of the present collection . . . Santiago Poems is not a large book (it contains eleven poems), but through Scully's finely controlled language we are presented with a rich, vivid, and eloquent chronicle of life in Santiago during the early months of the junta's power." --Roger Gaess May Day
"If the preachments are heavy, the language is leaden. Maybe the idea is that left wing poems shouldn't be too artsy, that political sincerity is evidenced by using language duller and less meaningful than that of The National Enquirer." --Ed Ochester, American Book Review. Line Break: poetry as social practice
"James Scully's essays, like his poems, refuse to soothe or simplify. They are continuously interesting because they take on poetry from so many angles, are written from a generous frame of reference and in a human voice. His fiercely demystifying intelligence is grounded in hope and realism for poetry itself along with other forms of dissident engagement." --Adrienne Rich Apollo Helmet
“James Scully writes political poetry and his intention is to arouse . . . Scully's real target is a contemporary poetry of which it can be said (he does) that its world is one / nobody lives in, not even / poets who close their eyes / to speak. The language here is deliberately flattened, though eminently quotable passages emerge from the rubble of theory and violent rhetoric. Any reader who emerges from contact with Scully's poetry untainted by unease is likely to have been feigning attention.” --Choice James Scully's sixth volume of poetry is one that “raises important questions about politics and human nature with an infectious indignation.” --Library Journal " . . . the sixth and arguably most astonishing book in what has by now shown itself to be the most intransigently leftist-revolutionary poetic project and career of our generation in the U.S. Scully has taken as his overriding subject the very foulness and complicity of our received notions of truth, beauty, justice and art, and forced us to confront concretely how these notions and their bearers allow themselves to be used . . . These poems are savagely successful, even brilliant anti-lyrical deconstructions, fueled by a rage so clean and focussed it seems as cauterizing and irreduceable as fire. Yet of course what makes Scully's fury so effective is precisely the stylistic-rhetorical vehicle [that] appears as a peculiarly flexible and effective fusion of William Carlos Williams' doggedly common American speech and sense of movement with a Brechtian explicitness of impersonal assertion. . . I think it safe to say that some . . . resistance will inevitably be directed against Scully and his poems themselves for not being properly artful, personalist, 'real' poetry at all." --Fred Pfeil "[Scully] understands politics as the antagonism between classes and his poetry belongs to a movement I might call the Revolutionary Tradition, a poetry that cannot be approached with the old standards of Romantic criticism insistent upon the apolitical individualism that sees the classless tree but not the forest on fire. Scully sees the forest in motion swept by mass political winds. He has no reluctance to speak of class politics, while so much political poetry remains centered upon instinctual, individual, moral or purely emotional protests. [He] strips away the masks of confusion and exposes . . . the contradictions in the ruling political arena . . . One of the characteristics of Revolutionary poetry is that it is intellectual and conscious, in opposition to unconscious and instinctual emotionalism. The argument in such poetry is very close to the surface, and we arrive at the poem's pathos through a marriage with intellect. This . . . allows us to consciously understand the meaning of the pathos we are given to feel." --Dale Jacobson Raging Beauty
Unreviewed Prometheus Bound
(with C. John Herington) "In the context of adequate but uninspiring versions, the translation by Scully & Herington (1975) stands out for its arresting contemporary voice as well as its scrupulous attention to Aeschylus' figurative language. This version is everywhere responsive to the Greek text, but equally loyal to an ideal of the candor and clarity of real speech . . . Because of the shortness of many of the lines, Scully & Herington's Prometheus Bound counts 1670 lines to the Greek's 1090, but it is fair to say that few other versions seem more spare or concise. The typographic layout of the text may now seem a little precious, but no one who troubles to read Scully and Herington out loud can doubt it is a milestone in the translation of Prometheus Bound. --Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English |
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