The Grove of the Eumenides

In the poet Frederick Glaysher's collection of literary essays, The Grove of the Eumenides, East and West meet in a new synthesis of a global vision of humankindranging over classic literature, ancient and modern, both Western and non-Western, from the dilemmas of modernity in Yeats, Eliot, Milosz, Bellow, Dostoevsky, to Lu Xun, Ryuichi Tamura, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, among others, from mimesis and deconstruction to the United Nations, with extensive essays on Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian literature.

Clearly the work of a poet-critic attempting to embrace a larger portion of human experience than the personal postmodern self, The Grove of the Eumenides reaches toward an epic vision of the twenty-first century. All the muck and glory of American and international experience and history mix in the complex tension of a mind struggling with itself and its age.

Acutely perceptive of the spiritual and moral nuances of literature, criticism, and culture, Glaysher confronts the loss of religious faith in the modern world and breaks through to a vision of the unity of the human longing for transcendence.

Frederick Glaysher privately studied writing with the poet Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan, lived for more than fifteen years outside Michigan in Maebashi, Japan, where he taught at Gunma University in the early 1980s, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation in Arizona, and on the Mississippi, ultimately returning to his suburban hometown of Rochester. Glaysher is the editor of both Hayden's Collected Prose (University of Michigan Press) and his Collected Poems (Liveright). He has published two books of poetry, Into the Ruins: Poems (ISBN: 0967042127) in 1999, and The Bower of Nil: A Narrative Poem (ISBN: 0967042178) in 2002.

A Fulbright-Hays scholar to China in 1994, Glaysher studied at Beijing University, the Buddhist Mogao Caves on the Silk Road, and elsewhere in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. While a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar in 1995 on India, he further explored the conflicts between the traditional regional civilizations of Islamic and Hindu cultures and modernity.

An outspoken advocate of the United Nations and accredited participant at the UN Millennium Forum (2000), he takes literary account of global realities.

In The Grove of the Eumenides, Frederick Glaysher invokes a global vision beyond the prevailing conceptions of life and literature that have become firmly entrenched in contemporary world culture.