Diana, Charles & the Queen

by William Heyen

Overview

A poetic exploration of the House of Windsor at the end of the 20th Century

In Diana, Charles, & the Queen, National Book Award finalist William Heyen captures the successes and shortcomings of the British royal family. His poetic vision allows us to see the humanity of each character: a young Elizabeth contemplating love while crying into a cloth woven by Gandhi, a gallant Prince Charles courts a wide-eyed Diana with anecdotes of his travels, and gradually, a frustrated Diana as as her marriage crumbles in its later years.

Completed before the tragic death of Princess Diana in 1997, this book is a multi-leveled literary work, stunning in its depth, and far removed from what has previously been offered on the subject of the royal family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781880238691
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	01/01/1998
Series:	American Poets Continuum , #45
Pages:	124
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

William Heyen is an American poet, editor, and literary critic. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and fiction, including three poetry collections from BOA Editions: Crazy Horse in Stillness (BOA, 1996), Pig Notes and Other Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry (BOA, 1998), and Diana, Chrales, & the Queen (BOA, 1998). Heyen has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

He taught American literature and creative writing at SUNY–Brockport, where he also briefly served as Director of the Brockport Writers Forum, a series of readings by and video interviews with numerous American and international authors. He retired from teaching in 2000, and in In2004, he was one of the five finalists for the National Book Award for poetry for his book Shoah Train (Etruscan Press, 2003). Born in Brooklyn and raised in Suffolk County, he currently lives in Brockport, NY.

Editorial Reviews

"a clever, off-beat narrative comprising 323 eight-line rhymed "poems" that explore the gulf between modern realities and the glamour of romance.
Library Journal

From the Publisher

Heyen has written extensively on the Holocaust and here continues his interest in historical subject matter, turning to the House of Windsor. The result is a clever, off-beat narrative comprising 323 eight-line rhymed "poems" that explore the gulf between modern realities and the glamour of romance ("the stuff of fairy tales"). Feeling "comic sorrow and admiration," Heyen probes the tangled behavior of famous people for "the origins of indiscretion & stupidity." "Princess of the lens," Diana emerges as the major voice in this semifictionalized sequence (an author's note informs that this book was completed before Diana's death). "Miserable and divine," growing up on Barbara Cartland romances, "shy/ aggrieved, bulimic" Diana faces many problems. Unfortunately, the anecdotal, contrived form of this work, which readers will find peculiar, trivializes rather than enlarges Heyen's considerable poetic ability and fails to do justice to Diana's life (or death). Overall, a well-meant attempt to transform current events into the order of poetry; recommended for graduate-school libraries.Frank Allen, Northhampton Community Coll., Tannersville, Pa.

Library Journal