num_pages: 143
description: `There can be no doubt of its cumulative power, its frequent brilliance. It is a major work within the span of recent years.' Wall Street Journal `Ramon Guthrie is a magnificent American poet in his seventies who has been overlooked . . . it is a deeply, heartbreakingly American book whose importance will become clearer and clearer as time passes.' The New York Times Book Review MOST of this extraordinary book was written while Ramon Guthrie was, as he thought, dying of cancer. The doctors gave him only a few weeks to live, but a month and fifty-seven transfusions later he was sent home, and soon after the American Institute of Arts and Letters presented him with an award. In this strange setting of the Intensive Care Ward he writes of the imprisonments, interrogations, torments, the gaolers and inquisitors, orderlies, nurses, doctors who take his ebbing life relentlessly in charge in what is a totalitarian regimen for all its affirmed benevolence. Throughout Guthrie maintains a bawdy, gusty, death-defying graveyard humour, with no illusions and no sentimentality. This masterly new book, in its energy, architecture, and probing of the human agony, is the crowning work of the long and distinguished career of this major poet/ RAMON GUTHRIE, a member of the French and Comparative Literature faculty at Dartmouth for many years, recently won the Marjorie Peabody Waite award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
language: English
title: Maximum Security Ward, 1964-1970
titlecomplete: Maximum Security Ward, 1964-1970
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 2
publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux