On Leave

Keith Tuma is the author of Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Northwestern, 1998) and editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001). He teaches at Miami University in Ohio.

Introduction One Thing After Another, Or, Quitting Taffety for Cloth Daybook Shooting the Air From Chicago to Buffalo Being and Time Callers Of God, Man, and Animals Out of Line Of the Avant-Garde and Its Others Puerto Vallarta More Callers Daybook Junk From Orono to Yellow Springs Les Anecdotiques All in the Family On the Road Acknowledgments

Poet and critic Keith Tuma spent part of a leave from teaching writing up remembered anecdotes in the context of the year's travel and rumination. Mainly dealing with encounters involving poets, the book makes itself companionable by often being very funny. Tuma is, as Randolph Healy writes, "one of nature's most agreeable raconteurs." Great beach reading for the summer. But there should be a warning on the cover: Take care, you will be stuck repeating some of these stories for the rest of your life. Notre Dame Review What a bad title for such a good--and, paradoxically, ambitious--book: though it presents itself as a low-pressure journal, the inconsequential deeds and recollections of a senior professor in a sabbatical year, On Leave unfolds to reveal a meditation on the anecdote as a form; an elegant sketch of grief, and of partial recovery; a calm revolt against the conventions of one-point-in-front-of-another, stiffly ineffective, argument about modern poetry; and (best of all) an amenable introduction to the sometimes prickly, too often unapproachable "avant-garde" (or, if you prefer, "post-avant") poets in Britain, Ireland, and America, among whom Tuma has made his lit-crit career. -- Stephen Burt Rain Taxi