Books published by The Waywiser Press

"A fascinating forensic study and a scholarly tour de force."--Julian Barnes"M. Degas Steps Out is a triumph of patience and perseverance, observation and speculation, research and imagination, in an ekphrastic genre that as far as I know Philip Hoy has invented. His profound meditation involves exegeses of stills from a nine-second silent, black-and-white film of an aging Edgar Degas taking the air on a Parisian Boulevard. Hoy's animation of these stills conjures another dimension altogether from that of the 'movie.' It makes one think now of Sebald, now of Proust."--Stephen Yenser, Distinguished Research Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles"Philip Hoy's protracted examination of a mere nine seconds of film of the aged Edgar Degas walking towards us down a Paris street has the effect of waking us up to the utter strangeness of human life and of the mysterious power of photography and film. Haunting."--Gabriel Josipovici, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex"A truly remarkable piece of work, this beautifully written essay proves to be as affecting as it is enthralling. Hoy is best known as a publisher and editor, but in these pages he steps out as an equally brilliant author. M. Degas Steps Out deserves to find a wide readership."--Jonathan Post, Distinguished Research Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles"Philip Hoy fully justifies spending so many pages on a mere 9 seconds of historical event. An exemplary piece of forensic research becomes, through his handling of it, an utterly absorbing story."--Christopher Reid"I haven't read a stranger, more original book in a very long time. It's a wonder. I suspect that M. Degas, lover of privacy that he was, would have been delighted by the book, which it's an understatement to call an 'essay.'--Sherod Santos, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Missouri"An engrossing treat: Philip Hoy's M. Degas Steps Out examines a short illicit film of Degas in his old age and turns it into an absorbing quest."--Miranda Seymour"What a superb essay -- a thrilling page turner and a powerfully moving memento mori. I love Hoy's patient attention to detail, the way he looks, then looks again, and in describing what he sees dramatizes as vitally as possible the pastness of the past, its vanishing immediacy. A fabulous and riveting piece."--Alan Shapiro, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillLiterary Nonfiction. Film. Art.

My German Dictionary, which won the fourteenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, is a guide to an idiosyncratic interior country, a map of the experience of absorbing and being absorbed by Central European language, culture, aesthetics, and history. It is a catalogue of small beloved things inflected by massive horrors. The poems are home to and haunted by Franz Marc¿s horses, ETA Hoffmann¿s tales, the Great War, Bertolt Brecht, Rosa Luxemburg, enchanted bears, Weimar Berlin, and vanished relatives, along with an entire alphabet of mishearings, mnemonics, and valentines for the German language. These are the poems of an historian wrestling with mastery of the unmasterable, the histories in miniature of a poet.

"e;Mary Elizabeth Pope's collection of short stories, Divining Venus, is a page turner. One wonderful story after another unfolds in this perceptive, engaging collection of such observant tales that it feels as if Ms. Pope has followed you around your whole life and figured out everything about you: your puzzling missteps in high school, your first and often mistaken love, your missed opportunities and chance encounters, your youthful mistakes and stunning betrayals, everything secret and true that has haunted you and made you who you are. Assured and steady, Ms. Pope's writing carries you deeper into yourself, where you will be happy to discover that you are not alone."e; - Robin Oliveira (author of My Name is Mary Sutter and I Always Loved You)

Clive Watkins's powerful second collection is by turns sensuous, sombre, lyrical and discursive. Already the Flames explores the position of those complicit in suffering or compelled to observe it in a world that appears ruled by malice or chance. The early sections are shadowed by the figure of Apollyon, the demon who attacks Bunyan's pilgrim. Hauntings, entrapment and escape are themes that weave in and out. The book moves towards an ambiguous release in the realm of the personal. The collection is remarkable for its formal range: poems, and sequences of poems, in free verse, in prose and in rhymed and unrhymed metres of various kinds. There are also several idiosyncratic and fluent translations. In Already the Flames Clive Watkins fulfils the expectations created by his first Waywiser book, Jigsaw, of 2003.

The Self-Styled No-Child, Cody Walker's second book of poems, offers an unlikely array of characters: Edward Lear, Mitt Romney, Amy Clampitt, and Andy Kaufman share the stage.Walker himself is ever-present, with his shrugs, his heartbreak, his "way-out rhymes" "I'd like to write some lines about the snow, / but--I dunno, / the snow seems so / fleeting: / a flock of gulls, late for a meeting." Full of comic interruptions and grave forecasts, these poems surprise, delight, and terrify.