Stroke of a Pen

<p>For over five decades Samuel Hazo has taught his readers about literature and life with generosity and awareness taking everyday experiences and translating them into songs at once familiar and surprising. In his poetry fiction essays and plays Hazo in a style that is unmistakably his own extols the wonderment and discovery that emerge in the act of writing in the movement toward wisdom that results from the expression of feeling. <i>The Stroke of a Pen</i> is a collection of the occasional essays on a variety of subjects from the relationship between poetry and public speech to the pursuit of the literary life to reading within a cultural context governed by power relations. Two essays focus on religion and literature and the final five include a literary travel essay on Provence a counterpointing one on the virtues of not traveling but remaining home a lighter essay that extends the discussion of home to houses a memory piece on the actor Gregory Peck and a personal reflection on the author's retirement. Throughout Hazo is belletristic in his approach calling on such writers as T. S. Eliot Wilfred Owen Jacques Maritain and Nathan A. Scott Jr. who deeply influences Hazo's thinking and writing in this entertaining collection.</p> <p><i>The Stroke of a Pen</i> will interest poets writers literary scholars and critics as well as broadly educated readers who judge the balkanized theory-and-jargon-driven engagement of literature to have lost track of the aesthetic dimension essential for the full appreciation of literature and life. By contrast Samuel Hazo's book affirms the necessary depth of the aesthetic impulse in the deep sources of the human quest after meaning. --Daniel Tobin Emerson College</p>