Mark Kyburz

A garden is a very special place with many faces, and it can lead us to previously unknown worlds. Anyone involved with gardens knows how they can touch the soul in countless ways. Garden and soul comprise a kind of secret in-between world, a space between the light and the dark, culture and nature, conscious and unconscious, spirit and body -- a space that has an irresistible attraction for us. Ancient wisdom tells us that gardens have a healing, nourishing effect on the human soul and body. The garden belongs to the great archetype of life and is one of the few big archetypal images that are experienced primarily as positive. This positive experience is significant because the garden is a part of the natural and cultural human environment, and thus, is particularly influential in the interaction between human beings and their environment. This delightful book invites readers to see and experience in new ways the abundance and variety of gardens and their influence on our inner life.

Critical tradition has established a certain way of reading Ezra Pound, one that places the meanings of the words on the page at the centre of interest and neglects poetic communication. The present study contributes to the recent challenge to this critical orthodoxy, which has led to his canonization as a "difficult" poet, by investigating the pragmatic dimension of Pound's work. In its effort to reconstruct the dynamic communicative interface between Pound and his audiences in the early period of his career (1908-1925), this study draws on relevance theory, a recent sharpening in pragmatic theory, not so much to produce a "new" reading of his poetry, but to suggest how Pound became difficult: it is argued that the relative success and failure of his poetry to enhance cognitive and civic renewal depended on the dialectic between his presumptions of audience and the interpretive expectations and skills of his actual historical readers.