Incarnation & Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? [Mīkstie vāki]

Essays on writers from Pablo Neruda to Sylvia Plath allow poet and essayist David Mason to explore the many changes we experience during a lifetime.

"Witty and heartfelt essays, shaken and stirred."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Mason’s sharp interpretations make a persuasive case that great literature’s complexity and ambiguity can, at its best, produce empathy and understanding in readers. Book lovers will find much to ponder.”
—Publishers Weekly

"David Mason believes in literature as a weather event—even an extreme one. He reads to be changed—drenched, burned, blown away. He has no wish to have his standing position confirmed, and is alert to the ways in which his subjects are changed, both by their writing and its reception. These essays move comfortably from the lines of a Nobel Prize-winning poet to the dwelling of a Greek peasant who could have stepped out of Homer, on to the perils of literary biography. Mason is a reader as much as he is a writer. He looks into the political in order to find the personal—not the other way round. Incarnation & Metamorphosis is engaging all the way through, not least when Mason acts on the assumption, 'The imagination is free.'”
—James Campbell, author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin

“Literary criticism,” David Mason writes, “ought to entertain as well as illuminate.” In these essays Mason tells stories about embodiment and change, incarnation and metamorphosis, drawing connections between art and life without confusing the two. Mason considers the many kinds of change we encounter in our lives, our desire for justice, and the ways great writers complicate that desire. He discusses the lives and works of Montaigne, Diderot, and Neruda, as well as his colorful father’s fascination with a fictional character. He takes up such contemporary figures as the daring Australian writer Helen Garner, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and the poet-critic Dana Gioia; and he has fresh things to say about the perils of fame in the careers of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney and mourns the loss of poet Michael Donaghy. 

Incarnation & Metamorphosis is a book about living with literature—Mason writes that literature tells "us that we are seen, warts and all. Criticism, such as the essays in this book, is a way of seeing back.”