David Hinton has done a remarkable job of assembling a single-volume anthology that will give readers a sense of the breadth and depth of three millennia of classical Chinese poetry, a rich sampling that covers the period from 1500 BCE to 1200 CE. Hinton moves from the oral tradition that feeds the Book of Songs and the Tao Te Ching; through early distillations of folk song in the Songs of Ch’u, the Music Bureau Songs, and the Lady Midnight Songs; to T’ang poets such as Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, and Han Shan with whom many readers in the West are already familiar as well as less familiar T’ang experimentalists such as Meng Chiao and the “mainstream” of Sung Dynasty poets concluding with Yang Wan-Li.
Hinton opts for a chronological order and nonobtrusive introductions to each poet and each of the five larger sections into which he divides the book. The result is a clear historical framework with enough philosophy and politics to give readers new to the material a coherent sense of a tradition that develops across time through a wide variety of voices and styles. Hinton has an ear for the voices and music that makes his translations work as poetry, and he is careful to let the poetry sing. He is, as he notes, working with the mainstream; so other translations of these pieces are available. But this is not an attempt to supersede those other translations with a “definitive” one: it is an important addition to the chorus of voices that has introduced Chinese poetry to English readers and has, in the process, transformed English poetry.
One of the most useful aspects of the book is the supplemental material that has been assembled online at http://us.macmillan.com/classicalchinesepoetry. This includes a version of the spectacular pattern poem Su Hui composed some 1600 years ago — a grid of 29 x 29 characters that contains more than three thousand possible poems (though “contains” seems hardly appropriate for a work of art that explodes in so many directions beyond the media of its own production).
The book includes a section of key terms, an essay on women’s poetry (including a little more on Su Hui), a finding list that will help readers reconcile Wade-Giles and pinyin systems of transliteration, a finding list for Chinese texts, and suggestions for further reading. All of these are amplified by the online resources that make this an especially useful starting point for students at all levels who are coming to Chinese poetry for the first time.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology. Translated and Edited by David Hinton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. ISBN 978-0-374-10536-5.
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after Hai Nan
I follow tracks and the lay of the land
cool my arms with irremediable emptiness
slave, slave, while drinking water I see a pretty slave
Slave : Dirge
my homeland
is not my homeland
when i return
I see it all for what it is
I see myself—
and them
for what they are.
Natasha Marin, Seattle
Hai Nan, “A Pretty Slave,” in Two Southwests. Virtual Artists Collective, 2008. ISBN 9780979882562.
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these things do matter
for Nathan Brown, after reading Two Tables Over
1
the secret
is painting halfway
between irony
and compassion,
beautifully
lost so locals
with real jobs
who never forget
where they are
will have reason
to love
2
and if you hear a voice
say you’ve gone too far
if you get to religion
pass on
mysteries of love
that made a friend
die twice
empty another museum
of fear with some old story
or other
3
write it in a poem
of Yeatsian architecture
lyrically poignant
posturing
4
leave the house
see who happens to be
next to you
play words
by ear
leave trails of them
for birds still
learning to make love
Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Nathan Brown. Two Tables Over. Cheyenne, OK: Village Books Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9791510-9-5.
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Jo Gill sets out two aims for The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath: “to offer new readers an accessible, authoritative, and comprehensive guide to Plath’s writing” and “to provide an incisive and insightful overview of key tendencies and developments in Plath criticism” (ix). She accomplishes both aims in an accessible introduction that will prove invaluable to students.
The first section, “Life,” is only thirteen pages long; but it is a useful overview of biographical details, and it clearly establishes, to Gill’s credit, that she will resist any temptation to posit a biographical “truth” against which to measure either Plath’s writing or critical assessments of it. From the beginning, her focus is on the writing; she is intent on turning the attention of students to the body of Plath’s work. The second section, “Contexts,” is perhaps the weakest in the book. While it points to important issues in Plath’s social-political context, including the cold war and McCarthyism, struggles for racial justice, and the emergence of “second-wave” feminism, there is a regrettable tendency to fragment the issues in ways that could render contexts incoherent. The most useful aspect of this section is Gill’s focus on Plath’s “double vision,” which she first defines as a conflict between “confessional” and “academic” poetry (21). As Gill rightly points out in subsequent chapters, the doubleness (or multiplicity) of Plath’s vision is one of the great strengths of her writing, enabling her to write in different genres and voices with different audiences in mind and guiding her attempt to bridge the presumed gap between “high” and “low” culture. Given Gill’s recognition of Plath’s engagement with social and political issues and her recognition (following a number of theorists of “containment culture”) that this engagement was enabled at least in part by the doubleness of vision necessitated by containment, it is interesting that no connection is made with W.E.B. DuBois’s recognition at the beginning of the twentieth century of such doubleness as characteristic of the experience of oppressed people, particularly people of color, in the United States. That recognition might have enabled her to more critically probe the motivation for the white flight that partly shaped Plath’s adolescent experience. Gill, surprisingly, appears to take “cheaper rates and good schools” in the suburbs at face value (26). That Plath doesn’t is evidenced in her growing recognition of the danger of “tidiness” (28), which can be partly traced to the interrelated experiences of the suburbs, the Cold War, and patriarchy, and which gives her writing a critical edge that is sharper than is often supposed when her poetry is dismissed as merely “confessional.” In Plath’s work, the personal is political and the confessional is social — metaphors, not similes, analogies, or simple means to an end. The remaining sections are most valuable for their introduction of the range of critical responses to Plath — grounded in biography, confession, mythology, feminism, psychoanalysis — and for their careful articulation of the constructions of Plath that have emerged over the years not only in struggles among critical and ideological perspectives, but also in struggles between her mother and Ted Hughes to control the narrative of her life after her suicide. That struggle, as Gill notes, had a direct impact on the availability of primary material, and critical approaches have already undergone some transformation as that impact fades (128).
Thorough notes and suggestions for further reading make this introduction particularly valuable as a supplement for students who are just getting acquainted with Plath’s writing.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Jo Gill. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-86726-9.
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Robert Faggen’s Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost is an excellent overview that will be useful to students at all levels. Short sections on Frost’s life and contexts provide historical perspective and insight into influences, including the philosophical influences of William James and Henri Bergson. Faggen has played an important role as a critic in making readers aware of Frost’s engagement with science, particularly Darwin and evolutionary theory. That work shines through here in summary form, with many pointers to further reading for students so inclined. Faggen’s discussion of Frost’s poetics should prove useful in guiding students beyond surface readings to engagement with his “sound of sense” and an often revolutionary versification “breaking rhythm across established meter” (29). The formal quality of so much of Frost’s poetry and his lifelong attention to established meter can make him look deceptively conservative. But his fascination with the complexity of ordinary language, the rhythm and sound of gossip, carried him beyond Wordsworth in attention to everyday speech and made him a master of its music. And his attention to the complexity of ordinary lives carried him beyond New England pastoral narrowly defined to serious engagement with an evolving America in which “being versed in country things” is an aid to understanding new “urban” realities.
Much of the book is devoted to close readings of particular poems, for which students tasked with such readings will be grateful. But the strength of the introduction lies in its ability to turn readers to the poems themselves. Students and others who make that turn will be equipped to engage the discussion with which Faggen ends the book in a short section on “reception.” Frost’s poems, which remain vibrantly alive, are still being received. This book will contribute to a community of appreciative and critical readers equipped to continue writing the reception of Frost’s work.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Robert Faggen. The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-67006-7.
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It is most appropriate that Jim Hoggard begins by correcting Plato – and that he does it with an oblique reference to myths that begin both “testaments” of the religious tradition that, with Plato, has come to be inextricably identified with “the West.” For a poet, as for a philosopher, it goes without saying that the word is in the beginning. But for a poet who sings the music of pumpjacks and rivers we wear in layers on clothes and skin, it is essential to begin with a “God from the first / being partial to things” (3). Thunder is the first word, “a celebrative / explosion of noise / echoing off / newly made matter” (3).
There is a philosophical sweep to this collection that makes the whole a response to Plato in four movements – a direction Ion might have taken had he been a poet as well as a performer of poetry (and had he not come to us as a character formed entirely by Plato with an end in mind). The movements are named “Graven Imagery,” “Different Kinds of Wilderness,” “Distant Homes,” and “Wind Bursts.” Hoggard’s take on graven imagery is an ongoing play with form – especially the sonnet, which flows through the entire collection, but also the pantoum, which gets the last word. The play with form is in the aniconic tradition of Hebrew prophecy – shaping things to see through them, finding words to speak silence: “the drama / of the voice / is the meaning / of the voice” (3). And the drama of the voice, like the thunder of the first poem, is notable for being partial to things – or, perhaps more to the point, being face to face with them.
In “Caught in the Drought,” one line stands on its own as a stanza in the familiar form of a fourteen line poem: “There’s nothing to do this year but wait” (10). Not to wait for, but simply to wait. And that carries us through a variety of wildernesses – the Louisiana bayou Jack Kerouac described as a manuscript of night we could not read, rattlesnakes, lovers, sycamore leaves that don’t decompose. Still correcting Plato: the world is a world of words, and in it there is a world of ideas; but there is no world of ideas above or beyond the world of things. This is it.
This “thatness” of things, the celebration of being immersed in them, makes Hoggard a nomad in the Deleuzian sense, at home on the road in the variety of places he sings in the book’s third movement – Vienna, Florence, London, Seville, Mycenae, Chihuahua, Cuba, Mosul. And in the end, the wind, like a spirit moving on the face of water: “We should stop getting lost in ourselves / We should know how to read the world / yet we look at it blindly or indifferently / Listen: the wind here blows insistently” (76).
Read the world, Hoggard says. Divide at the joints, Socrates might add. A world of words to the end of it, yes – an explosion of noise still echoing off matter still newly made – a music in the wind’s insistence that gives us something to sing, for which we as poets, as readers of poetry, as listeners are grateful.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
James Hoggard. Wearing the River. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-916-72717-8.
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This new edition of Willis Barnstone’s translation of the poems of Mao Zedong (originally published by Harper & Row in 1972) includes thirty-five poems written between 1925 and 1963 (with Chinese and English on facing pages) along with an introduction and brief notes on translation and Chinese versification by Barnstone, a sample of Mao’s calligraphy, and (as an afterword) a snippet on Mao’s poetry from a 1983 interview with Richard Nixon conducted by Frank Gannon. The book is valuable for Barnstone’s comments on Chinese poetry – but it is also a fascinating historical document, with significant insights into two of the most powerful political figures of the twentieth century, Nixon and Mao, both of whom left decidedly mixed legacies.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Mao’s poetry is just how traditional it is, in both form and content. Barnstone’s introductory essay highlights this, also noting that Mao “modestly” dismissed his poems “as being of little value” (22) and did not recommend them to the young, “who must find their own way” (23). Barnstone’s observation that Mao, who wrote influential essays on art and literature, followed “little or none of his own counsel” (23) is telling. Separating the practice of those with political power from their art and from their philosophy is a tricky matter made trickier by proximity. Barnstone notes in his introductory essay that “the main published essays on Mao’s poems in Beijing and elsewhere are not much help in evaluating and understanding them; except in offering useful annotation on allusions, studies of the poems tend to be so full of admiration that there is much paean singing, little criticism” (22, 23). Almost forty years later, the uncritical admiration has faded enough to quiet the paean singing – and it has not been entirely replaced by uncritical condemnation, so there may be an opening now for a fresh reading.
Standing alone as poems, these are competent but not remarkable. They would likely not be read at all (and Richard Nixon certainly would not have discussed them with Zhou Enlai) if not for the continuing political significance of their author. What is remarkable, though, at least to an American audience, is the fact of a political leader in the midst of an intense struggle like the Long March turning to poetry that is competent if not brilliant – finding solace in the writing of it and turning to it naturally as a means of focused observation. And equally remarkable is the fact of two political leaders (Nixon and Zhou) turning in their last meeting to the poetry of a third. As a traditional poet, Mao reads the natural world through which he passes with eyes formed by centuries of mythology. And he turns those eyes and that reading to the politics in which he is engaged. A Marxist appreciation of the power of myth might at least remind us not to be surprised if it plays a role in tying revolution into time and history. That a revolutionary leader could be so unremittingly traditional is partly explained by the power of myth and tradition in shaping perception and action. Writing in 1972, Barnstone understands this as “Old and new China” coming together in Mao’s “fresh poems in the traditional style” (24). Old and new China are still coming together, of course, and “traditional style” remains an issue in every new China – as in every place where “newness” encounters tradition (and what place could there be where it does not?). Barnstone’s commentary is particularly helpful in making English readers aware that the interplay of poetry and politics is as conventional in Chinese society as the interplay of politics and religion is in the United States – so conventional that it mostly flies beneath the radar of public consciousness.
For the most part, the traditional style will not be at issue. Even a cursory reading of the poems confirms it, both in terms of form and content. The poems look like traditional Chinese poems, and the allusions that shape observation of contemporary affairs are classical. What will be at issue is the freshness. Take the second stanza of “In Praise of the Winter Plum Blossom” (105), written in December 1962, as an example: “The plum is not a delicious girl showing off / yet she heralds spring. / When mountain flowers are in wild bloom / she giggles in all the color.” This is written in the lyric style called ci, and it is a response to a Song dynasty poem by Lu You. But, as Barnstone notes, it reverses the ending of Lu’s poem “which speaks of peach blossoms that will signify fallen petals and dust, with only the fragrance left” (147). Does Mao’s vision of Spring in Winter constitute freshness, and does the plum blossom as giggling girl bear comparison to Sappho’s girl as an apple? There is a small window for freshness in poetry so clearly tied to traditional form and traditional images. Mao did not recommend it for the young, but the question is whether more experienced eyes can see something new in wild flowers heralding spring though they are not showing off. As a poet, Mao apparently thought he did. It is difficult for an audience to read that now without reading through the almost fifty years that have passed since; but, at the beginning of that half century, it is intriguing that the possibility of something new could be spoken by a revolutionary in the form of a traditional poem that responded to an older poem and to the world by only slightly turning it.
Politically, more Burke than Mao, perhaps. But interesting reading nonetheless. Read it, and let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
The Poems of Mao Zedong. Translations, Introduction, and Notes by Willis Barnstone. University of California Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-520-25665-1.
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In his introduction, Neil Corcoran draws the lines within which this Cambridge Companion explores English poetry with admirable clarity: “The poetry treated here is ‘English’ in the sense that it’s written in the English language, or versions of it, by poets who are, or were, of English, Scottish or Welsh origin, or have an origin or family attachment overseas but have been resident in Britain or taken British nationality” (1). That is at once a wide and an explicit net that raises issues of nation, language, politics, and identity – by what it includes and by what it excludes – from the outset. These issues were contested terrain in the twentieth century, and the terrain continues to be contested in the twenty-first. The work of poets in the period, whether explicitly engaged in contesting terrain or not, was (and is) affected by the way those issues were (and are) handled. And, as Corcoran suggests, leaving the Irish story untold in this volume (on mainly “practical” grounds, as he puts it) means that an Irish presence – particularly in the person of William Butler Yeats, haunts the collection from beginning to end. That alone makes for an interesting commentary on English poetry, particularly as the questions of language and national identity are complicated by nationalist struggles, devolution, and immigration in the course of the twentieth century. Add the fact that T. S. Eliot is not treated individually in this collection, and you have a century of English poetry haunted by two presences (and a multiplicity of “versions”) that have transformed the music of English as we hear it now.
The collection consists of seventeen essays in four sections: “contexts,” “moderns,” “modernists,” and “later modernities.”
The three essays in the “contexts” section address the transition from Victorian to modern (with particular attention to Gerard Manley Hopkins), the relationship between “modern” poetry (a matter of periodization) and “modernist” poetry (a matter of style and ideological orientation), and “postmodernism” as an “elastic” term (stylistic, ideological, and periodizing at the same time) particularly problematic for poets who – as Redell Olsen puts it – are “often relatively uninvested in the capital of a culture industry” (42) and critics (perhaps more invested) who investigate their work. The essays in this section do an excellent job of problematizing categories that might otherwise be so rigid as to obscure connections across boundaries historians have constructed for the sake of order or convenience. Hopkins is perhaps the most important instance of boundary crossing in this collection, which clearly outlines stylistic and historical reasons for making the line drawn at Victoria’s death in 1901 permeable while also noting quirks of publication that put the poems in this case in a different century than the poet.
The other three sections are generally chronological – moving from A.E. Housman, Charlotte Mew, Thomas Hardy, and Edward Thomas through D. H. Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, W.H. Auden, William Empson, and Dylan Thomas to Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. The last four essays continue the generally chronological plan under titles that also group poets along lines partly determined by historical developments and partly by the identity politics of the period: “Black British poetry and the translocal” (which focuses on Grace Nichols, Louise Bennett, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Bernardine Evaristo – but also reaches back through Afro-Caribbean music to Claude McKay), “Poetry and class,” “A Scottish Renaissance” (associated with Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Liz Lochhead, Robert Crawford, Don Paterson, and Kathleen Jamie), and “Lyric adaptations” (ending with Carol Ann Duffy, Martianism, and Simon Armitage).
There are problems, of course, of the sort that confront any survey: what is left out is as important in determining the shape of the object or period surveyed as what is included, and grouping poets – one chapter for the Scottish Renaissance, one chapter for women, one chapter for “Black British poetry” – may effectively marginalize them. But Stevie Smith’s comment (cited by Linda Anderson) turns this marginalization into an invitation to rethink the whole poetry of English. “But I’m alive today,” she said, “therefore I’m as much a part of our time as everybody else. The times will just have to enlarge themselves to make room for me, won’t they, and for everybody else” (174). Everybody is not included in this survey, but (in the words of the publisher) “these specially commissioned essays by highly regarded poetry critics offer an up-to-date, stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century” – an overview that gives students a taste of the variety of English poetry rather than an illusion of its singularity. There are ghosts that dominate the story told here – but there is also Stevie Smith and the calypsonian Young Tiger singing “I was there” as he sings about the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (206).
When Corcoran writes “English language, or versions of it,” he invites a correction, not an alternative – joining John Agard in “inciting rhyme to riot,” opening up possibilities not only for “reverse colonization” but also for the new songs that accompany cities made new between Victoria and the turn of another millennium.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry. Edited by Neil Corcoran. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-69132-1.
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from the dying room
reading Nitoo Das
Kit Kelen
there is the smell
of strangers on trains
ghosts they might be
ghosts they’ll become
not even child ghosts
can be bought with lollies
but
a bribe of stories
tinselled in rhyme?
today a viola, tomorrow a cello –
who can measure the green of breeze?
a huddle in rag puddles
Houdini hands and handcuffs and
run out of resurrections
good god lie down
and rust with your feathers
have that much decency
once in this while
*
in the cow-dung steeping
light of dawn
Buddha waking
the steamy forest of dreams
innocent eyes –
all that wishing yet to scale off –
party
and then annihilation
*
in the dying room
midnight bursts
like the ochre ripening of breasts
this body I will become
like that perfect lover
in silence abiding
beyond words
or colours
worm to worm
a tête-à-tête
trees just as wise
as each other
*
the ripeness of sight
and the smell of your distance
some bower bird
makes the poem like this
out of anyone’s lines
and everyone’s lines
and just as long
as they’re blue
Kit Kelen, Macao
Nitoo Das. Boki. Virtual Artists Collective, 2008. ISBN 978-0-9798825-4-8.
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“Poetry is not about making things happen,” claims poet-critic Donald Revell, “That’s what language does. Poetry is about making language happen.” The poems in Glenn Sheldon’s first full-length collection, The Bird Scarer, live up to this decree and then some; under Sheldon’s guidance, words find so many new ways to happen, that a palpable energy burns off the pages. Time and again, phrases and sentences beg a second (even, third) reading, not because their meaning is obscure, or vocabulary twisted, but because the language has been kicked in the caboose. The poems reveal, strip down, and rebuild in exhilarating ways—not “Ha-Ha” exhilarating, but wake-up the senses (as well as the sensibilities) “Aha” exhilarating, as in the poem “Class Wars,” which explicates the art scene in 1980s Chicago. Here the speaker describes the self-conscious gallery artist as “trying to be discreetly visible // in his or her black and expensively / pensive clothing . . . .” There is an “artist look,” which is not so different from the “poet look,” which is not so different from what is hawked on Madison, or (since this is Chicago) Michigan, Avenue. Likewise, the speaker acknowledges the small-in-salary/“we came for the food” attendees, among whose ranks he counts himself: “A free night on the town was nothing / to sneeze at. The cheese was often / cut into cubes as if cubism, at last, / was profitable.” Sheldon’s wit packs a punch in this, as well as other, poems by playing sound into meaning(s).
Although Bird Scarer’s geographies ultimately range from Boston to Cuba and further south, the central perspective is that of an urban transplant, from the East coast to Chicago, where, as the new kid in town, the speaker can see himself and his adoptive city, with a quasi-voyeuristic eye. A healthy dose of postmodern skepticism—“I’m on Clark Street in dark / pants; all I know is how not to be a ghost,” and three pages later: “I’m here, wherever that is, / where everyone dresses in black like vampires”—informs each poem, while the core value under-girding the collection as a whole, is its honesty and, therefore, vulnerability. The narrator’s playing with cards, but he shows us their faces: I’m new in town, I’m out of work; I’d rather read in the library than get sucked into the grind. The poems’ observations arise organically from the combustion of brain cells colliding with each new piece of information.
But the poems are not confessional; the speaker is addressing an alter-ego. We are privy to the mental contractions of one blessed and damned with the ability to view his life from the outside, a tourist “visiting” his own dailiness with a quasi-voyeuristic stance of interest/disinterest, compassion—and detachment. The perspective is nearly always from above: in one poem, the protagonist/narrator is standing on an El platform (“higher than the blind /rooftops”), in another, he rides a double-decker bus; elsewhere, he is situated in his own imagination, hypothesizing about the future: “Our meal / will taste of ports and less populated / palaces just down river.” This aerial view gives a cinematic scope to the poems’ settings. And, cumulatively, we come to see that language both connects, and disconnects: “But the word will not / be denied height / or aerial view.” What could be a trope of “distancing” is actually free-ing; staying connected, while stepping back and acknowledging how any word we think or utter is, by definition, an abstraction; an attempt from “out of the body” to give name to the inexpressible knowledge of the purely sensate.
One of the biggest challenges for a writer today is bridging the gap between postmodern blasé banality and a beating heart. Sheldon, in honest, sad, funny-true poems, meets the challenge. The Bird Scarer has the feel of being born of a wise, fully formed intelligence, one that engages at the same time that it reminds: we are all, to some extent, posing; not just the artists, in their seriously dark de rigueur opening-night garb, nor the wealthy, or the tourist . . . all of us are dancing through our days, somewhere between what is actual and what is imagined.
reviewed by Priscilla Atkins, Holland, Michigan
Glenn Sheldon. Bird Scarer. Červená Barva Press, 2008. ISBN 9780615171678.
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