The Heart of Tents
by
Steven Vita


“Vita, whom Oxford don John Bayley calls
’a poet of great promise as well as performance’”
- Tufts Journal
 
"’Vita is a poet of great promise as well as performance.’"
- John Bayley, Oxford University, KSUI-FM, Iowa City NPR

“the master of all he surveys.”
- The Spectator, London, on The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature by John Bayley of Oxford University
 
“He has taste and a talent for judging, and as a critic and man of letters he makes his gifts available to a public with an informed interest in what used to be called belles-lettres. “
- Frank Kermode,  King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Cambridge University,
​“The King of Crit” review title of The Power of Delight

"Stephen Spender, who first published W.H. Auden and whose own poetry was brought to the literary public by T.S. Eliot, calls Vita's abilities as a poet 'gifted.'"
- Daily Southtown
 
“'He is, I believe that increasingly rare bird, the true original.'”
- Daniel Weissbort, founder with Ted Hughes of Modern Poetry in Translation journal
La Gazzetta Italiana

Steven Vita and his poetry are written of (in addition to those quoted here) by literary experts who have taught at Oxford University, the University of Chicago, Duke University, New York University, the University of California at Berkeley,
Harvard University, Princeton University, and more with descriptions as "original," "brilliant," and “exciting.” Steven Vita is
written of in The New York Review of Books by John Bayley of Oxford University as verification for the direction of contemporary poetry, and the essay is in The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature, essays selected by Leo Carey, literary editor at
 The New Yorker.
  
"'Magico.'"
- Anna Caflisch, Rice University, Oggi 7
  
"These poems are at the same time simple and subtle - like life itself, which has to be accepted in its intricate, opaque evidence. Vita has a very special gift for images, which turn into visions of the reality inside objects, of landscapes reduced to their essence. Anguish is the other side of bliss; life and death lie at the heart of these very striking poems, which sometimes remind me of Japanese poetry, but which also unmistakably belong to the tradition of the best American poetry. And yet this voice is deeply original, disturbing, moving."
- Bruno Vercier, Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris), Flatbush Life
 

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