II.
Unnamed ghosts trouble Baxter as much as those he addresses specifically; when local and personal history intermingle in the Jerusalem Sonnets, crises of faith tend to arise, as in the twenty-fifth sonnet:
… continue reading...The brown river, te taniwha, flows on .
As Reviewed By: Dan Brown
Tom Disch’s first book of poems in ten years has the heft you’d expect of a collection so long in preparation: eighty poems spanning almost 150 long-format pages.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ben Downing
It was his sonnet “A Bookmark” that first caught my attention. “Four years ago I started reading Proust,” the poem begins, and goes on to skewer Remembrance of Things Past and its mincing narrator-“Oh, what a slimy sort he must have been- / So weak, so sweetly poisonous, so fey!”-with… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Eric Ormsby
It takes a brave poet these days to praise the beauties of obesity.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
“A spiritual life doesn’t require taking Holy Orders, only a decision to submit to a lifelong discipline.”
— Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008
Few American poet-critics since Edgar Allan Poe have brought a practitioner’s knowledge of writing genre fiction to the service of poetry reviewing.… continue reading...
Thomas M. Disch. The Priest: A Gothic Romance. Alfred A. Knopf 1995. 352 pp.
Tom Disch. Dark Verses & Light. The Johns Hopkins University Press 1991.… continue reading...
Interviewer’s note: William DeWitt Snodgrass is commonly credited with inaugurating the “confessional” era in American poetry in 1959 with his first collection, Heart’s Needle. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and there is evidence that it influenced Robert Lowell’s own pioneering collection Life Studies.… continue reading...
