W. W. Norton

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First Lines from New Books Out Today, January 30, 2012

“On October 13, 1991 my grandparents killed themselves. It was a Sunday. Not really the ideal day of the week for suicide.”
An Exclusive Love: A Memoir by Johanna Adorjan, translated by Althea Bell

“By the time he received the Nobel Prize in 1975, Eugenio Montale was widely recognized as a poet who had revolutionized the art in his native Italy, and whose voice reverberated among the great international moderns: Eliot, Pound, and Valery, along with Yeats and Cavafy.”
The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1925 - 1977 translated by William Arrowsmith and edited by Rosanna Warren

“This book has been written for anyone who has to deal with people on a daily basis. Whether you are a teacher, a professor, a pilot or a top manager, you will be confronted by the same questions time and again: How do I make the right decision? How can I motivate myself or my team? How can I change things? How can I work more efficiently? And on a more personal: What do my friends reveal about me? Do I live in the here and now? What do I want?”
The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler

“I live in a lovely place. It is a small farm, just a few acres, but it is beautiful. I created this farm over many years, and it is still evolving, and will continue to for many years hence. I never intended to be a farmer and yet it feels right. I enjoy a connection to the land, to the animals here, and I am endlessly thrilled to make food; to feed people.”
Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land by Kurt Timmermeister

Decline of Values

I’m reading a B.A. thesis
on the decline of values. Logically,
falling implies a height from which
to fall, and who’s that stupid?

Life is neither up nor down, and still less
in between. Life has no idea
of up and down, fullness and void, before
and after. And knows zip about the present.

Tear up your pages, ditch them in the sewer,
abandon your degree and you can brag
that you were momentarily alive (maybe).

Eugenio Montale, from The Collected Poems

The Bangs

Don’t let your hand brush back
the bang of hair that veils
your cherub brow. It too speaks
of you; on my road, it’s my whole horizon,
my only light, it and the jades
circling your wrist; the curtain your dispensations
spread in the tumult of sleep; the wing on which you move
unharmed, transmigratory Artemis
among the wars of the stillborn. And if, now,
the background blooms with airy down, it’s you, suddenly
descending, you’re there to marble it, your restless brow
fuses with the dawn, darkens it.

Eugenio Montale, from The Collected Poems, translated by William Arrowsmith