Bibliotreks.com

elcome to Bibliotreks.com. Here, we have offered for sale some of the finest available copies of rare and collectible books on travel, exploration, discovery, views and archaeology.

I founded Bibliotreks in 1999 out of a growing interest in certain rare books, particularly those written in the first person by the travelers, explorers and discoverers who brought back word of places previously unknown to the western world. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that history is fresh and new again when read through their eyes - certainly more so than through the dry, third-person compilations of editors who weren't there. The books themselves, as historical artifacts, become messengers from another time and place, bearing wondrous news of these discoveries. They deliver this news not only by their texts, but by their bindings, their illustrations, their physical condition and their provenance. I have never forgotten the sense of freshness and newness that such first-hand accounts bring.

In recent years, I have wandered to places distant from the realm of rare books. Now it is time to display the collection of treasures I have brought back - An Invocation of Fragments. Copies are available through Kelsay Books, or just click on the image below. Here are the blurbs describing the collection:

The reader of Ted Charnley's An Invocation of Fragments will immediately be struck by three qualities present throughout this remarkable and consistently surprising collection: learning, wit and the mastery of craft. The allusions are multiplicitous and wide-ranging, and the array of forms - Sapphics, sonnets, villanelles, pantoums, rondeaus, to name only some - is dauntingly impressive. Moreover, it is as if the poet has taken to heart Keats' advice to Shelley and loaded "every rift with ore" - without being unduly dense, individual lines are freighted and packed with meaning. The "fragments" the poet feelingly invokes and that the reader discovers and savors here are those of Western Civilization itself, summoned and reflected upon by a well-stocked, curious and committed consciousness.

- Bruce Bennett, author of Just Another Day in Just Our Town.

From Sappho, to Groucho, to an eighteen-year-old in his muscle car, to a father lamenting his daughter's beauty that will no doubt hasten her leaving the nest, these poems gather together a rich collection of people. Whether heroes and villains of history, myth and literature, or ordinary folks living everyday lives, Ted Charnley brings them alive by speaking not just about them but also to them and through them. Many poems, some in traditional forms, skillfully employ techniques such as meter, rhyme and alliteration. Vivid personas, combined with dense, textured descriptions and creative renderings of social conscience, make this book a delight to read.

- Beth Houston, Editor of Rhizome Press.

An Invocation of Fragments showcases Ted Charnley's talent for matching poetic form to subject. He uses the accentual, alliterative prosody of the Anglo-Saxons to depict an aged but still-sturdy barn. For his love song to New Orleans - one that refuses to flatter the beloved - he chooses common meter. To describe the dance macabre of the nurses who make their rounds tending to contagious Covid-stricken patients, he writes a rondeau. He makes the repetend of "The Rape of Proserpina" what the celebrated sculptor Bernini said of his model, on whom he forced himself: "I have given her no voice." Having chosen the clarifying, difficult work of writing formal verse, Charnley allows a gravedigger to speak for him: "What's hard on the hands frees up the head."

- Alfred Nicol, author of Animal Psalms.