Reviewed: Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014.
Reading a good poem by Louise Glück is like taking a slap to the face in a large, cold bathroom.… continue reading...
Mark Wunderlich is a poet of remarkable skill and range. His best poems are lyrical observations of the shared essence of man and of beast, of their taste for brutality, and of their struggles with the cruelties of nature and of one another.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Wave by Andrew Sofer. Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2010. 63 pages, $14.00
The epigraph to Andrew Sofer’s debut collection of poetry comes from Yehuda Amachai—“And for the sake of remembering / I wear my father’s face over mine”—and it could hardly be more apt.… continue reading...
If lighting a fire on a winter night is a way of staying alive, then so, one feels, was the writing of the poems in Gerry Cambridge’s new book, Notes for Lighting a Fire.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Mayakovsky’s Revolver by Matthew Dickman. Norton, 2012.
Shot full of suicides, clichés, and sex, Matthew Dickman’s Mayakovsky’s Revolver is a collection of poems not unlike A Confederacy of Dunces—a mediocre work made important by personal tragedy. … continue reading...
In one of the great misreadings of one poet by another, John Keats complained to his publisher that, in the poetry of John Clare, “the Description too much prevailed over the Sentiment.”… continue reading...
Anthologies, particularly those dedicated to presenting the poetry of a particular stretch of geopolitical space-time, are, by necessity, Procrustean beds. Thousands of poets producing work over many decades get pruned to a mere few dozen names.… continue reading...
Reviewed: No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems by Bruce Taylor. Cormorant Books, 2011.
There’s a marvelous description in Book X of Paradise Lost of the astronomical and climatological changes that accompany the Fall, and of the beginnings of predation among the animals. … continue reading...
Reviewed:
Recollected Poems by Daryl Hine. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2009. 246 pages.
& by Daryl Hine. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2010. 112 pages.
When Daryl Hine’s Recollected Poems was published in 2009 it marked something of a comeback for a poet who in the mid 1990s had turned his back on the publishing industry and begun posting his new poems on a website, through which he also accepted donations.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Broetry by Brian McGackin. Quirk Books, 2011. $12.95
Broetry’s title jumps into a spot your mind didn’t know was there. Sure, you know “bros” and you know “poetry,” and it somehow seems more than natural for a book called Broetry to appear in your hands.… continue reading...
(Editor’s Note: As it was announced today that Tomas Tranströmer had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the editors of the CPR thought it fitting to re-post this fine review of his work by Bill Coyle from 2009.)… continue reading...
Reviewed: Signs and Wonders by Charles Martin. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 74 pages.
To publish a collection of new poems late in a distinguished career is a slightly anxious proposition, both for the poet and for readers.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. 1st edition, 1938. 2nd edition, 1950. 3rd edition, 1960. 4th edition, 1976.
What was the most important literature textbook of the 20th century?… continue reading...
Reviewed: Ziggurat by Peter Balakian. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Peter Balakian’s poetry is a “strange brew of wind and light” distilled to one degree or another from primal trauma.… continue reading...
Reviewed: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan. Grove Press, 2011. 288 pages. $14.95.
Kay Ryan’s pulling-herself-up-by-her-own-muddied-Blundstone-bootstraps-story is already the stuff of legend. … continue reading...
Reviewed: A City of Angels: A Verse Play in Three Acts by Ben Mazer. Cy Gist Press, 2011
A verse drama—particularly when encountered, not on stage, but in a limited edition chapbook—has a tall order in front of it.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Into These Knots by Ashley Anna McHugh. Ivan R. Dee, 2010. 68 pp. Hardcover. $22.50. Winner of the 2010 New Criterion Poetry Prize.
In Ashley Anna McHugh’s “All Other Ground Is Sinking Sand” (“On Christ the solid rock I stand” goes the previous line of the hymn this title is taken from), a villanelle addressed to the speaker’s father, we find ourselves at the ailing father’s bedside and learn that he has a bedsore that has turned gangrenous:
Doctors say that he could die: They have to hurry,
might amputate.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Rain by Don Paterson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009. 61 pages.
What we most love we must lose. That implacable fact of human existence is the ground bass of Don Paterson’s excellent book Rain.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Sunday Houses the Sunday House by Elizabeth Hughey. University of Iowa Press, 2006. (Winner of the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize.)
Forty years ago, Randall Jarrell sadly proclaimed that the gods who had taken away the poet’s readers had replaced them with students.… continue reading...
Scholarship noted: Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry by Anthony Low. New York University Press, 1978.
I. A Lasting Model?
Certain religious poets of 17th-century England, often called the “Metaphysical” poets, have gained as firm a place in the Western canon as any group of poets enjoys today.… continue reading...
Reviewed: The Whole Nine Yards: Longer Poems by Daniel Hoffman. Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 96 pages.
According to the author of The Whole Nine Yards (winner of the L.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Shoulder Season by Ange Mlinko. Coffee House Press, 2010. 81 pages.
If Shoulder Season were a town, it would be a deserted one. All evidence of life—buildings, boardwalks, beds and tables, monuments and blankets, pots of flowers, tools, cars and cribs—would be left intact, the people gone.… continue reading...
Making the Angels Wince
Reviewed: The Making of a Matriot by Frances Payne Adler. Red Hen Press, 2003. 100 pages, $13.95.
The Making of a Matriot is the sort of book that makes one embarrassed for poets in general, and Frances Payne Adler in particular.… continue reading...
Reviewed: every riven thing by Christian Wiman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 93 pages.
From its hardcover heft and granite-engraved dust jacket (remove the jacket and a black, bible-like, hardback cover is revealed), to its ivory paper stock and black section divider pages (complete with roman numerals blazoned in white), every riven thing announces the solemnity it aims to deliver and does: verses crafted as if with a chisel on stone, the weight of each line falling into the congregation of a hushed readership, organ sounding in the background—
… continue reading...There is no consolation in the thought of God,
he said, slamming another nail
in another house another havoc had half-taken.
Reviewed:
The Bride of E by Mary Jo Bang, Graywolf, 2009
The Lions by Peter Campion, University of Chicago Press, 2009
One common dictum about poetry, often heard in creative writing classrooms, goes like this: “You can’t write about senseless experience with senseless poems,” or substitute any undesirable adjective for “senseless”—say “meaningless” or “disorderly” or “boring”: a boring poem doesn’t productively make the reader feel an interesting kind of boredom.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Peregrinary by Eugeniusz Tkaczszyn-Dycki, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, Zephyr Press, 2008, $14.95
Translator Bill Johnston observes that Eugeniusz Tkaczszyn-Dycki’s hyphenated last name is a bit much even for Poles, and I follow their (and Johnston’s) custom in referring to the poet henceforth as Dycki—pronounced Dits-kee.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
The Art of the Sonnet by Stephen Burt and David Mikics. The Belknap Press, 2010.
… continue reading...Eternal glory to the inventor of the sonnet. However, although so many beautiful sonnets have been written, the most beautiful is still to be done.
Reviewed:
After the Revival by Carrie Jerrell. Waywiser Press, 2009.
Domestic Fugues by Richard Newman. Steel Toe Books, 2010.
There are a number of striking similarities between these books: for starters, there’s the preference both poets display for traditional meters and forms, as well as the variety of those forms—sestinas, sonnets (Petrarchan, Shakespearean, terza rima and otherwise ) blank verse, rondeaux, villanelles.… continue reading...
Ghost Girl by Amy Gerstler. Penguin Books, 2004. 67pp, $16.
First, a problem of definition. This latest catch-all of Amy Gerstler’s, Ghost Girl, is really less a “book of poems” as such than it is a bringing together, a propulsive gleaning of all the notions of a poetic nature that happened to pass her way since Medicine, her last such collection and the eleventh to appear before the one under review.… continue reading...
Where Shall I Wander by John Ashbery, Ecco Press, 2005. $22.95
When even a very fine poet is able to lob twenty-five volumes of verse into circulation in no more than twice that number of years, there are bound to be, as age withers and custom stales, trace-amounts of dross visible amid the threads of gold and silver.… continue reading...
Talking with Poets. Edited by Harry Thomas. Handsel Books, 2002. $22.00
Unless very skillfully choreographed, interviews with poets are at best temporizing exercises (to show one is still alive creatively); at worst, a crushing bore.… continue reading...
Music and Suicide by Jeff Clark. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. 67 pp. $20
Music and Suicide is Jeff Clark’s fourth book of poems and its advance billing in publishers’ blurbs seizes glowingly on this poet’s growing reputation as an “unclassifiable classic in underground American writing.”… continue reading...
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
Three years ago the Collected Poems everyone was talking about was J.… continue reading...
Now the Green Blade Rises by Elizabeth Spires. W. W. Norton and Co., 2004. $12.95.
As Reviewed By: James Rother
Since 1981, when her first collection of poems, Globe (1981), made her name a watchword for serenity and poise, Elizabeth Spires has seen her body of work not just praised, but held up as a role model for other poets.… continue reading...
Generations by Pattiann Rogers. Penguin Books, 2004. $16.
Generations, the title of Pattiann Rogers’s new book of poems, is not one seized upon lightly. She has come to it, having entered upon the mysteries it entails over some eight books of poetry that span nearly a quarter-century.… continue reading...
New and Selected Poems, 1974-2004 by Carl Dennis. Penguin Books, 2004. $18.
“Thinking poets,” if the prevailing folklore is to be believed, are not just thin on the ground, few and far between, and countable only on thumbs; they are rarer even than hens’ false teeth, and with the passing of such giants as A.… continue reading...
The Rest of Love by Carl Phillips. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2004. 70 pages. $20.
There have always been poets—all right, there have always been a few poets—who, as was said of the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, could produce examples of their art as effortlessly as an apple tree produces apples.… continue reading...
Chinese Whispers by John Ashbery. FSG, 2002. $22.00.
As Reviewed By: James Rother
The career of John Ashbery continues the poetic perpetuum mobile of our time.… continue reading...
New British Poetry. Edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic. Graywolf Press, 2005. $16
As Reviewed By: James Rother
It’s been a while since the relative healthiness of relations between poets on this side of the pond and those still lodged in the mother country have been top priorities with editors of American literary journals.… continue reading...
Western Art by Deborah Greger. Penguin Poets Series, 2004. $18.
As Reviewed By: James Rother
Debora Greger is one of those poets who can’t help obsessing about art’s hidden agenda—the one lurking beneath layers of veneration which for centuries have surrounded art with more awe and wonder than anything outside of revealed religion.… continue reading...
Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems. University of Chicago Press, 2004. 245 pp.
As Reviewed By: James Rother
At your next party, try this on your poetry-loving guests.… continue reading...
Concerning Some Recent Versions of the Metamorphoses by Ovid.
As Reviewed By: James Rother
[Unless otherwise attributed, all translations are the author’s.]
It is remarkable, but hardly strange, that the works of Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (better known as Ovid [43 B.C.-17… continue reading...
Painting the House by Bibhu Padhi. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. 1999. 79 pp.
In Indian English poetry Bibhu Padhi belongs to the second generation of post-Independence poets.… continue reading...
Bare Face by Jayanta Mahapatra. Kottayam: DC Books (India), 2000. $7.95.
As Reviewed By: Rabindra K. Swain
Today, when India is known abroad more for her fiction than her poetry, Jayanta Mahapatra’s sixteenth volume, Bare Face, arrives.… continue reading...
Uncollected Poems and Prose by A. K. Ramanujan. Edited by Molly Daniels-Ramanujan and Keith Harrison. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
As Reviewed By: Rabindra K.… continue reading...
Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Ranjit Hoskote. Viking (New Delhi) 2002. 148 pages. 195 Rupees.
As Reviewed By: Rabindra K. Swain
“For a time,” warns Michael Roberts in his introduction to the first edition of the influential anthology The Faber Book of Modern Verse, “the false poem may be more popular than the true one could have been.”… continue reading...
Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions by Maurice Manning. Yale University Press, 2001.
Small Gods of Grief by Laura-Anne Bosselaar. Boa Editions, 2001.
Saunter by Joshua Mckinney.… continue reading...
A Close Reading of Two Contemporary Indian Poets
As Reviewed By: Ravi Shankar
The world’s largest secular democracy has been exporting its letters in English for a few literary generations, but in the wake of a few luminaries—Rabindranath Tagore or more recently, Arundhati Roy—many strident, lyrical voices have gone unrecognized (after all, this wave of Indian poets and novelists, for all the hype, is still but a ripple in publishing in terms of sheer numbers).… continue reading...
Crucible by Daniel Bosch. Winner of the Boston Review’s First Annual Poetry Contest. Handsel Books, 2002.
Discography by Sean Singer. Yale Series of Younger Poets. Yale University Press, 2002.… continue reading...
Notes from the Divided Country by Suji Kwock Kim. Louisiana State University Press, 2003.
20 Poems by Seán MacFalls. Peregrine Press, 2001.
Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive by Patrick Rosal.… continue reading...
A Personal Survey of Modern Verse in Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania (Part II)
As Reviewed By: Stephen Schwartz
II.
Modern Bosnian literature
As should be seen throughout the present essay, translation is a difficult art, especially when dealing with poets from a cultural context so different from ours, as North Americans. … continue reading...
A Personal Survey of Modern Verse in Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania
As Reviewed By: Stephen Schwartz
I will begin this highly selective and idiosyncratic discussion of modern Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Albanian poetry with an anecdote. … continue reading...
Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems by W. S. Di Piero. Knopf, 2007. 247 pp.
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
A hardy strain of poets in America feels that the craft of poetry is often too crafty, that the verse line need be nothing more than a space in which to say something striking, and that elevated diction will cut the poet off from his readers, who are in fact his peers.… continue reading...
Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use by Robert B. Shaw. Ohio University Press, 2007. 305 pages.
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
A bright woman of my acquaintance, educated in a field far from literature, recently asked me what poetry anthology I would recommend to help her become better acquainted with contemporary writing.… continue reading...
Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems by W.D. Snodgrass. BOA Editions, 2006.
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
Have you boned up on your Snodgrass? There’s no time like the present.… continue reading...
Jack and Other New Poems by Maxine Kumin. Norton, 2005.
There is a kind of poem that tastemakers and status jockeys tend to ignore: one neither difficult (because highly figurative, allusive, multilayered) nor terse and formal (with every syllable required to justify itself).… continue reading...
An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. Edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes. University of Michigan Press, 2002. 442 pages
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
Seeking still newer ways of challenging themselves with physical barriers to be overcome, young urbanites are flocking to a new sport, called “parkour” by its French inventors.… continue reading...
In Defense of Reason by Yvor Winters. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947. Reprinted with an introduction by Kenneth Fields, Ohio University Press / Swallow Press, 1987.
The Function of Criticism by Yvor Winters.… continue reading...
All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification by Timothy Steele. Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, 1999. 366 Pages ($34.95 cloth, $16.95 paper).… continue reading...
Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter by Timothy Steele. University of Arkansas Press, 1990. 349 pages.
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
A great deal of foolishness has been written over a wide swath of history regarding the composition of poetry.… continue reading...
The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry by Don Paterson. Graywolf Press, 2001. 106 pages, $14.00 paperback.
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
There are poets who tell it straight and those who are oblique.… continue reading...
Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation by William H. Gass. Basic Books, 1999. 233 pages.
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
It is undeniable that Rilke has exercised a continuous fascination on both poets and ordinary readers in the English-speaking world since his death.… continue reading...
The Lords of Misrule: Poems, 1992-2001 by X. J. Kennedy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 93 pages.
As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
Some PhD student will one day write (or perhaps has already written) a treatise on the structural similarity between short poems and jokes.… continue reading...
After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography edited by Kate Sontag and David Graham. Graywolf Press, 2001.
As Reviewed By: Kathleen Rooney
If you have any interest in confessionalism as a mode of artistic expression, and you haven’t visited the blog Post Secret, “an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard,” then it’s high time you did.… continue reading...
Berman, David. Actual Air. Open City, 1999.
Corgan, Billy. Blinking With Fists. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Doughty, Mike. Slanky. Soft Skull Press, 2002.… continue reading...
Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: a Novel-in-verse. Vintage Books, 1998. 149 pages
Evaristo, Bernardine. The Emperor’s Babe: a Verse Novel of Londinium, 211 A.D.… continue reading...
Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form by David Caplan. Oxford University Press, 2005.
As Reviewed By: J. S. Renau
The most charming aspect of David Caplan’s disjointed study of poetic form, Questions of Possibility, is his even-tempered catholicity.… continue reading...
A panel discussion with Stephen Burt, Adam Kirsch, Meghan O’Rourke, and David Orr. Moderated by Deborah Garrison.
Presented by the National Book Critics Circle and Housing Works Bookstore Café, April 10, 2006
As Reviewed By: J.… continue reading...
A discussion of “The Christian Writer Today”
17th Annual Erasmus Lecture delivered by Dana Gioia
Presented by The Institute on Religion and Public Life October 16, 2003
As Reviewed By: J.… continue reading...
North Street by Jonathan Galassi. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
As Reviewed By: J. S. Renau
Jonathan Galassi has been on the scene for some time now, as a top-notch literary editor, a gifted translator (most notably for his rendering of Eugenio Montale), and lately, as the editor-in-chief of Farrar Straus Giroux.… continue reading...
The Book of Lamentations: A Meditation and Translation by David R. Slavitt, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
As Reviewed By: J. S. Renau
As a child in a Protestant church, I was required by my elders to commit passages of the Bible to memory, and so it is in many Protestant churches that children become acquainted with transliterated Hebrew prosody before they know what prosody, as such, is (assuming they ever learn).… continue reading...
Cairo Traffic by Lloyd Schwartz. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
As Reviewed By: J. S. Renau
It would seem, after several generations of practitioners, that the American poet’s appetite for the spare, vaguely surrealistic, free-verse poem is limitless.… continue reading...
Reflexes from Anathapuri by K. Chandrasekharan. Writers Workshop (Calcutta, India) 2001.
As Reviewed By: J. S. Renau
I first came upon the poetry of K. Chandrasekharan last year while picking through an issue of Verse magazine dedicated to Indian poets writing in English.… continue reading...
Brit Lit: New Writing from the UK and Ireland (October 17, 2002) with Simon Armitage, Mimi Khalvati, Glyn Maxwell, Paul Muldoon & Pascale Petit.
A panel moderated by Todd Swift, and presented by the Council for Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), the Baruch Center for the Performing Arts, Rattapallax Press, and Poets House.… continue reading...
To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry by W. D. Snodgrass. BOA Editions, 2002.
In Radical Pursuit by W. D. Snodgrass. Harper & Row, 1977.
As Reviewed By: J.… continue reading...
Selected Translations by W. D. Snodgrass. BOA Editions, 1998.
As Reviewed By: J. S. Renau
W. D. Snodgrass occupies an odd niche in American poetry. One would think a living poet of his generation (he was born in 1926), with a Pulitzer Prize in tow and a legitimate claim to have been one of the first “Confessional” poets, would have risen to the stature of, say, Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, but Snodgrass resides largely in the margins of American poetry (this assumes, perhaps naively, that there is a center).… continue reading...
The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress by W. D. Snodgrass. BOA Editions, 1977.
The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle by W. D. Snodgrass.… continue reading...
The Rampage by Miroslav Holub. Translated by David Young, with Dana Hábová, Rebekah Bloyd and the author. London: Faber, 1998. £7.99.
Narození Sisyfovo: Básné 1989-1997 by Miroslav Holub.… continue reading...
Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Bloodaxe Books. £10.95
Robin Riley Fast, The Heart as Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry.… continue reading...
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 by Lucille Clifton. Boa Editions. 132pp. $15.00
As Reviewed By: Justin Quinn
Lucille Clifton came to prominence in the Black Arts movement in the late 1960s, but this selected poems covers a less dramatic period as the poet moves into middle- and then old-age.… continue reading...
Simon Armitage & Robert Crawford, eds. The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Viking. 443pp. £25
Michael Schmidt, ed. The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English.… continue reading...
Poetry at One Remove: Essays by John Koethe. University of Michigan Press, 2000.
The Constructor by John Koethe. HarperFlamingo, 2000.
As Reviewed By: Justin Quinn
John Koethe is one of the small number of prominent American poets who does not make a living by teaching creative writing.… continue reading...
Squares and Courtyards by Marilyn Hacker. Norton, 2000. $21.00
As Reviewed By: Justin Quinn
Poetic autobiography has always been the grand theme of the poetry of Marilyn Hacker.… continue reading...
Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study by Tim Kendall. Faber & Faber/FSG. $15.00 (paper).
As Reviewed By: Justin Quinn
It has always been difficult to disentangle critical appreciations of the poetry of Sylvia Plath from the lurid anecdotage that surrounds her life and premature death.… continue reading...
Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996. Edited by David Carter. HarperCollins, 2001. $40.00 (hbk).
As Reviewed By: Justin Quinn
Does Allen Ginsberg need an introduction? Arguably, not at all.… continue reading...
Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot by Denis Donoghue . Yale UP, 326pp.
Adam’s Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature by Denis Donoghue. University of Notre Dame Press, $24.95 192pp.… continue reading...
Eve Patten. Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Four Courts Press. 207pp.
R.F. Foster. W.B. Yeats: A Life. II: The Arch Poet, 1915-1939.… continue reading...
James Merrill’s Apocalypse by Timothy Materer. Cornell UP.
Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson by Alison Lurie. Viking.
As Reviewed By: Justin Quinn
The publication of James Merrill’s Collected Poems this year has made his long poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, appear somewhat eccentric to the course of his career.… continue reading...
An Unkindness of Ravens by Meg Kearney. BOA Editions, 2002. $12.95, 81 pps.
The Guests at the Gate by Anthony Piccione. BOA Editions, 2002. $13.95, 68 pps.… continue reading...
Collected Later Poems by R. S. Thomas. Bloodaxe, 2004. 368 pages, $25.95.
As Reviewed By: Marc Pietrzykowski
“And I that have not your faith, how shall I know
That in the blinding light beyond the grave
We’ll find so good a thing as that we have lost?”… continue reading...
John Clare: A Biography by Jonathan Bate. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003. 650 pps. $40.00
‘I am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate.… continue reading...
“The Maya Angelou Life Mosaic Collection.” Available at Hallmark Cards and Gifts. Various pieces, priced from $7.99 to $49.99.
As Reviewed By: Marc Pietrzykowski
Maya Angelou’s new “Life Mosaic Collection” at Hallmark arrives at a time of crisis in the world of greeting card verse.… continue reading...
As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry by H. L. Hix. Etruscan Press, 2002. 148 pps., $17.95
Surely As Birds Fly by H. L. Hix. Truman State Press, 2002.… continue reading...
Americus, Book 1, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. New Directions, 2004. 91 pages, $21.95.
The Unsubscriber, by Bill Knott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. 122 pages, $20.00.… continue reading...
The Return of Pleasure by Martha Elizabeth. Roth Publishing, 1996.
As Reviewed By: Devesh Patel
I have never read Martha Elizabeth’s poetry before, but on the back cover of the collection The Return of Pleasure, one reviewer notes that “[r]arely does one read a book of poetry that gives such easy delight… ” I disagree.… continue reading...
Books mentioned in this review:
The Humble Administrator’s Garden (Carcanet, 1985)
All You Who Sleep Tonight (Knopf, 1990)
Beastly Tales (Viking, 1991)
The Golden Gate (Random House, 1986)
As Reviewed By: Devesh Patel
I want a poet, an uncommon want–and the poet wants form, something the uncommon critic will hopefully understand.… continue reading...
Pen Chants or 12 Spirit-like Impermanences by Lissa Wolsak. New York: Roof Books, 2000. $9.95 (paperback), 74 pp.
As Reviewed By: Ethan Paquin
New from Roof Books (the New York house that brought us L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E magazine, and books by its prominent practitioners including Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Hank Lazer, Jackson MacLow and Ron Silliman), Lissa Wolsak’s Pen Chants feels like it’s ushering in a new day of sorts for the Language school.… continue reading...
Other Traditions by John Ashbery. Harvard University Press, 2000. 168 pp. $22.95 (hardcover)
As Reviewed By: Ethan Paquin
Other Traditions proves that Ashbery’s classic poem “The Instruction Manual” is more than reverie: he truly does well at writing informative primers.… continue reading...
Thieves of Paradise by Yusef Komunyakaa. Wesleyan/ University Press of New England, 1998. 130 pp. $19.95 (hardcover)
Talking Dirty to the Gods by Yusef Komunyakaa. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2000.… continue reading...
Signs and Abominations by Bruce Beasley. Wesleyan University Press, 2000. 136 pp. $12.95 (paper)
As Reviewed By: Ethan Paquin
Despite the freedom in his fourth book–plentiful sectioning of poems; spatial liberalism (experimentation with enjambment, spacing, indentation); lofty language; the use of up-to-the-second names and places–Bruce Beasley has written a piece of supreme symmetry, has crafted an architecture so streamlined as to be the subject of a Charles Sheeler gelatin print.… continue reading...
Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese by Sam Hamill. BOA Editions, 2000. 280 pp. $19.95 (paper)
As Reviewed By: Ethan Paquin
Thomas Merton, whose The Way of Chuang Tzu is perhaps one of America’s better-known translations from the Chinese, begins that book by explaining his “translation” process was essentially “’imitations’ of Chuang Tzu, or rather, free interpretative readings” culled from “four of the best translations of Chuang Tzu into western languages.”… continue reading...
Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) by Anne Carson,. Princeton University Press, 1999 (hardcover, $29.95) and 2002 (paperback, $14.95).
As Reviewed By: Ethan Paquin
Just because one can write something, one doesn’t necessarily have to write it.… continue reading...
The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton. FSG, 852 pages. $40
By: Anthony Moore
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (1917-1977) came into the world high on the social ladder.… continue reading...
Eye-Baby by Lawrence Sail. Bloodaxe, 2006. 63 pages
As Reviewed By: Lorne Mook
The October 2007 issue of Contemporary Poetry Review was devoted to Louis MacNeice, in recognition of his centenary year.… continue reading...
Littlefoot by Charles Wright. FSG, 2007. 91 pages. $23 cloth.
As Reviewed By: Lorne Mook
Those who know Charles Wright’s career know the story. While in the Army, in Italy, in the spring of 1959, Wright went to the shore of Lake Garda and read “Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula” near the spot where Ezra Pound had composed it, discovering—for the first time, at age 23—poetry propelled not by narrative but by association, the kind of poetry he was meant to create.… continue reading...
The Oxford India Ramanujan, edited by Molly Daniels-Ramanujan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004)
As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant
It was a singular moment in the history of Indian letters when A.… continue reading...
Trappings by Richard Howard. Turtle Point Press, 1999. 81 pp. $14.95 paper.
As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant
Richard Howard is the high priest of the most secretive sect of the cult of art, one that, sheltered from the rude gaze of public scrutiny, seeks to reward only the initiate.… continue reading...
Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself by C. K. Williams. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 170 pp. $21 hardback.
Repair by C. K. Williams. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999.… continue reading...
Shells by Craig Arnold. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. 79 pp. $20 cloth, $12 paper.
Ultima Thule by Davis McCombs. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000.… continue reading...
Life on Earth by Frederick Seidel. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 68 pp. $22 hardback.
As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant
After the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, the New York Times, New York magazine, and other media devoted significant space to the state of the arts, wondering if the usual banalities that pass for American cultural life had now, finally, been rendered null and void.… continue reading...
Blind Huber by Nick Flynn. Graywolf Press, 2002; $14.00 (paper), 89 pp.
As Reviewed By: Randall Mann
Nick Flynn, who generated considerable buzz for his first collection, Some Ether, has followed it up with a project book about bees.… continue reading...
by Rafael Campo. Duke University Press, 2002. $15.95 (paper). 88 pages.
As Reviewed By: Randall Mann
Grave things occur in Rafael Campo’s poems: AIDS, intolerance, exile, the inequities of the health-care system.… continue reading...
No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000 by R. S. Gwynn. Story Line Press, $16.95. 167 pages.
As Reviewed By: Paul Lake
If even a rough correspondence between poetic accomplishment and public reputation existed in America today, R.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
In his enormous Pulitzer Prize-winning account, Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer describes the kaleidoscopic tumult and turmoil of the 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest American involvement in Vietnam.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: David J. Rothman
Read David Rothman’s elegy here: “Going Like Hello”
“All I want to do is have a little fun before I die.”… continue reading...
Taking the Occasion by Daniel Brown. Ivan R. Dee, 2008.
Reviewed By: John Foy
In a market flooded with poetry, and so much of it so poorly made, you need a reason to pick up a new book.… continue reading...
A review of “Critical Contexts,” a roundtable on contemporary poetry criticism hosted by the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University on Monday, March 30th, 2009.
The Woodbury Poetry Room’s recent roundtable discussion on contemporary poetry with Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt, and Maureen McLane was a lively beginner’s discussion of what a poetry critic ought to be—thoughtful reader?… continue reading...
It is always risky for a poet to accept the commission of an inaugural poem; it is especially risky for a reputable poet who is well established in the poetic community.… continue reading...
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Farrar Straus Giroux, $45.
… continue reading...“Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I’ve been re-reading Emerson) for several days.”
Reginald Gibbons, Fern Texts. Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series.
Rick Bursky, The Invention of Fiction. Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series.
Ian Randall Wilson, Theme of the Parabola. Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series
Poetry chapbooks are a strange breed, poetry’s awkward teenager.… continue reading...
Wine critic Robert Parker shot to fame in the early 1980s. It was said that within seconds of tasting a vintage he could identify a wine the public would love.… continue reading...
Seeing the large, round, beaming black man coming toward me in the Casablanca restaurant in Harvard Square was a thrill—the hug was warm, fiercely close, long and so welcome.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Ivan Blatný, The Drug of Art: Selected Poems. Edited by Veronika Tuckerová. Ugly Duckling Presse, $15.
When a mysterious and silent young man began delighting staff with his piano playing at a mental health unit in Kent in 2005, the numerous suggestions as to his identity included a Czech musician called Tomas Strnad.… continue reading...
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...
How problematic is poetic description? Certain schools of poetic thought—perhaps inflected with post-modernism’s uneasiness about “claim-making”—regard description as dangerously akin to definition: a bundle of similes can harden into a claim about the way the world actually is, as opposed to remaining a tentative hypothesis about how it appears to be.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Dismal Rock by Davis McCombs. Tupelo Press, 2007. 62 pages.
Like the phantom farmers, sorters, and curers who haunt “Tobacco Mosaic,” the eighteen-poem sequence that opens his second collection, Davis McCombs, the deserving recipient of both a Yale Younger Poet award and the Dorset Prize, works with a quiet, practiced confidence.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
Longing Distance by Sarah Hannah. Tupelo Press, 2004
Inflorescence by Sarah Hannah. Tupelo Press, 2007
In May 2007, the talented and vibrant poet Sarah Hannah died tragically young, leaving behind a small but impressive oeuvre, her bereft family and friends (including this author), and many devoted students.… continue reading...
The eye becomes concentric through contact with nature. – Paul Cézanne
John Haines is well known as a writer who has communicated not only his rare experience of homesteading in Alaska, but also a view of modern society as seen from the perspective he gained there.… continue reading...
Reviewed By: David Mason
Here it is, folks, almost free of charge-another taxonomical declaration!… continue reading...
Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber
Read: X. J. Kennedy’s “The Pacifier”
It’s rare nowadays to find maxims and adages embedded in poems, though verses were once a common and accepted way of transmitting received wisdom.… continue reading...
Reviewed By: Catherine Tufariello
… continue reading...I like poems where you don’t really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them.
Read: X. J. Kennedy and KidLit
I first heard X. J. Kennedy read in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I was in a lecture hall at the local university, weary and dispirited from an overdose of “serious” poetry readings, and I glanced at the doorway, deliberating on whether or not I should make my escape to the local bar.… continue reading...
Reviewed: A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. Edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
The Letters of Robert Lowell.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
The Collected Poems by Kenneth Koch. Knopf, 761 pages.
On the Edge. Collected Long Poems by Kenneth Koch. Knopf, 411 pages.
Many poems by Kenneth Koch seem written to amuse and instruct a roomful of undergraduates.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
The Buried Houses by David Mason. Story Line Press, 1991
The Country I Remember by David Mason. Story Line Press, 1996
The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry by David Mason.… continue reading...
A Lover’s Quarrel by Carmine Starnino. Porcupine’s Quill, 2004.
The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry. Edited by Carmine Starnino. Vehicule Press, 2006.
As Reviewed By: Bill Coyle
Halfway though the title essay of A Lover’s Quarrel, his collection of reviews and essays on Canadian poetry, Carmine Starnino writes, “If Joseph Brodsky can declare poetry to be humanity’s anthropological destiny, then Canadian poetry is possibly its evolutionary dead-end.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Jack Foley
Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems. Edited by Charles Bernstein. American Poets Project/The Library of America, 2006.
… continue reading...In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find.
A Survey of Verse Scribblers on the Silver Screen
As Reviewed By: Kathleen Rooney
If you hit the trivia section of the Internet Movie Data Base entry for Steven Spielberg’s 2002 high-tech adaptation of Philip K.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Maria Johnston
In a note on Louis MacNeice’s poetry penned in 1964, Louise Bogan observed that, “the Collected Poems 1925-1948 should, although not so arranged, be read in chronological order, for it is an added pleasure to watch the opening out of a true lyric gift, and of one so clearly illustrative of the subtle shifts and adjustments that have occurred within English poetic tradition during this century.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Katy Evans-Bush
In 1963, after Louis MacNeice’s premature death of pneumonia, Philip Larkin wrote that “his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the news-boys were shouting .… continue reading...
Reviewed: The Blue Butterfly by Richard Burns. Salt Publishing, 2006.
That Richard Burns is not as well known as his poetry merits, even in his native England, is a situation for which I can think of a couple of reasons.… continue reading...
New Collected Poems by W. S. Graham. Edited by Matthew Francis, with a foreword by Douglas Dunn. Faber & Faber, 2005
What is the language using us for?
As Reviewed By: Alfred Corn
Myths about poetry and its production resist rational criticism, and we may be wasting our time trying to deconstruct the fable that English-language poetry has unfolded under what might be called a presiding genius, a directive energy moving from place to place at different points in history.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Maria Johnston
Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon. Faber, £14.95, 107 pp.
Paul Muldoon’s tenth poetry collection Horse Latitudes arrived at the close of 2006 together with hisThe End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures on Poetry, a collection of lectures delivered during his time as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Long Home by Christian Wiman. Story Line Press, 1998.
Hard Night by Christian Wiman. Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
When the mantle of Poetry editor descended on the 37-year-old Christian Wiman in 2003, many a poet-critic burned with envy.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Why Speak? by Nathaniel Bellows. W.W. Norton, 2007. 110 pages.
Why speak? A good question. But this debut collection provokes more specific questions: In what way are these poems not short, short, stories?… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Ooga Booga: Poems by Frederick Seidel. FSG, 2006. 112 pp.
Glamour-fueled magazines, like New York, do not characteristically devote much ink to poets.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed
John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by Kevin Young. Library of America, 2004.
Kevin Young’s admirable edition of John Berryman’s verse (for the Library of America’s American Poets Project) meets the primary expectations readers may bring to a new edition of Berryman’s selected poetry.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed
Rhinoceros by Kevin Ducey. American Poetry Review. $23.00
Kevin Ducey’s great strength is his daring. He frequently appears silly, he risks silliness in his work, and this silliness sometimes succeeds admirably.… continue reading...
Burning Wyclif by Thom Satterlee. Texas Tech University Press, 2006. $19.95
Sakura Park by Rachel Wetzsteon. Persea, 2006. $17.95
As Reviewed By: Adam Kirsch
I read Burning Wyclif, Thom Satterlee’s debut collection, because it was recommended to me by a friend, without knowing anything about the book or the poet.… continue reading...
Reviewed: The Long Meadow by Vijay Seshadri. Graywolf Press, 2005.
“Moving on to the next slide,” says Seshadri, in a put-on lecture about a genius painter done in by his own powers of self-abnegation:
… continue reading...we can see, twisted and deliberately coarsened as it is,
the exact same theme,
revisited now with an
ambition and gigantism made all the more monstrous
by the still soaring line,
instinct with delicacy and intelligence,
by the palette still fresh and strange,
the siennas and umbers
and crimsons and yellows seasoned
with the crushed carapaces of iridescent damselflies.
As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed
There is no key to Samuel Beckett’s poetry. It is a body of work that can be as oblique, resistant, and complex to the scholar as it is to a novice reader.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, by Scott Donaldson. Columbia University Press, 2007. 553 pp., $34.95.
Edwin Arlington Robinson: Poems, selected and edited by Scott Donaldson.… continue reading...
Reviewed: 100 Essential Modern Poems. Joseph Parisi, Ed. Ivan R. Dee, 2006.
We have been in the age of the anthology for more than a century now, and nothing suggests we are about to leave it.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Thirst by Mary Oliver. Beacon Press, 2006.
I first came across Mary Oliver’s poetry when I was in high school, and her most recent collection, American Primitive, had the fresh imprimatur of the Pulitzer Prize on the cover.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Daniel Bosch
It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving, and as the Writing Studio at Walnut Hill’s recent visit to the Geraldine R.… continue reading...
Reviewed: The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The Traditions in English (College Textbook Edition) (Paperback), Edited by Jack Zipes, W. W. Norton, 2005. 2471 pp., $80.95
As one would expect, the new Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature doubles as a textbook and as poundage for weightlifting.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Jack Foley
Madonna Septet by Ivan Argüelles. Potes & Poets Press: 2000.
Musica Humana by Ilya Kaminsky. Chapiteau Press: 2002.
After by Jane Hirshfield.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Jack Foley
Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics. Edited by Robert Kimball. American Poets Project/The Library of America, 2006.
… continue reading...If I were Lord Byron,
I’d write you, sweet siren,
A poem inspirin’…
A killer-dilleroo!
The Optimist by Joshua Mehigan. Ohio University Press, 2004.
Hapax by A.E. Stallings. Triquarterly, 2006.
As Reviewed By: Adam Kirsch
To get a sense of the bleak and illusionless intelligence that animates Joshua Mehigan’s poetry, the best place to start is the title poem of his first collection, The Optimist.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Maria Johnston
The Sea Cabinet by Caitríona O’ Reilly. Bloodaxe, £7.95, 61 pp.
… continue reading...I am rereading Moby Dick in preparation for the exam deluge tomorrow-am whelmed and wondrous at the swimming Biblical & craggy Shakespearean cadences, the rich & lustrous & fragrant recreation of spermaceti, ambergris-miracle, marvel, the ton-thunderous leviathan.
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
A Review of “Ezra Pound in His Time and Beyond: The Influence of Ezra Pound on Twentieth-Century Poetry.” Special Collections Exhibit, University of Delaware Library, curated by Jesse Rossa; catalogue published by the University of Delaware Library.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Read “District and Circle” here at The Times Online
Seamus Heaney has become so institutionalized that it is virtually impossible for him ever to reclaim outsider status.… continue reading...
Robert Frost’s two-and-a-half year sojourn in England (1912-1915) made him as a poet. After a long apprenticeship in New Hampshire, he placed his first book, A Boy’s Will, with a London publisher, thrilled the Georgian poets with his rustic New England facade, met W.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Joan Houlihan
The To Sound by Eric Baus (Verse Press, 2004)
Hat on the Bed by Christine Scanlon (Barrow Street Press, 2005)
Figment by Rebecca Wolff (Norton, 2004)
The lag time between the appearance of an original, culturally significant art form and the culture’s ability to apprehend it has a long, well-documented history.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Books Discussed:
The Apple That Astonished Paris by Billy Collins. University of Arkansas Press, 1988.
Questions About Angels by Billy Collins.… continue reading...
New British Poetry. Edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic. Graywolf Press, 2004. Paper: $16.00.
“Anthologies provide the easiest access for American readers into contemporary British poetry, and the lack of reliable contemporary anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic may account for a large part of the apathy and misunderstanding between the two literatures,” wrote Dana Gioia some twenty years ago (in the title piece of Barrier of a Common Language, his recent collection of essays and reviews).
As Reviewed By: Christopher Bakken
Poets-authoritative as they are on Eros and Thanatos, ether and effulgence-are rarely the specialists we turn to when, being Americans, we long to investigate work, that thing at the bedrock of our particular cultural expertise.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Aaron Baker
Civil unrest, wars, and insurgencies rage around the globe, but for most of us, comfortably ensconced in some version of a Western lifestyle (a “lifestyle” itself being one of our consumer choices), this news, like that of distant weather, almost always takes place on the level of heady abstraction.… continue reading...
As the assistant literary editor of The New Republic, and later as the book critic for the New York Sun, the poet-critic Adam Kirsch has written a constant stream of articles on contemporary poetry as influential as any in recent years.… continue reading...
Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry by Dana Gioia. University of Michigan Press, 2003. Paper: $16.95
… continue reading...Although the notion is rarely articulated openly, there is a tacit assumption in most anthologies and criticism [in the United States] that in the past century American poetry-vigorous, innovative, and bold-decisively vanquished its safe, tired, and tame British counterpart….
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. 71 pages.
The trick of transparency, like all sleight of hand, does not admit close scrutiny.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Fourteen On Form: Conversations with Poets by William Baer. University Press of Mississippi. 265 pages.
The liveliest moment in William Baer’s collection of table-talk occurs in an interview with Douglas Dunn at St.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. USA $24.00, Canada $37.00
Anne Carson’s most recent collection, Men in the Off Hours, is a conspicuous departure from the uniform tone and patient psychological exploration of her previous book, Autobiography of Red, which, for all its intellectual elegance, was essentially a bildungsroman, a formational novel in verse.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Americana by John Updike. Knopf, US $23. 95 pages.
John Updike balances upon, and in many ways defines, the center of the beam in American literature.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
It is a peculiar pleasure to hear Anne Sexton read her poems, though her parched agony carries through and occasionally sends a shiver down the spine.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Voice of the Poet: Five American Women
Gertrude Stein, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Muriel Rukeyser
Gertrude Stein is the odd woman out in this collection, her fame owing as it does to a broad array of achievements.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
James Merrill is usually imagined as a genteel lyric poet who lived a genteel lyrical life, engaged by purely domestic concerns, whether in New England or Greece, while turning out some of the most balanced and swiftly canonical American poems of the century.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
John Ashbery has often been described as the most important poet writing in English today. Even if this cannot be said with any great deal of enthusiasm, one may relent and admit that he is certainly the most influential poet to cast seeds on American soil for some time.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
In 1962, as CIA analysts stood over grainy photographs of what they believed to be Russian missile bases in Cuba, Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her poem ‘Sandpiper’ of the sea receding, where “(no detail too small) the Atlantic drains / rapidly backwards and downwards.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Few twentieth-century poets in English have achieved such lofty heights of fame or been surrounded by such cumbrous shrouds of legend as Sylvia Plath.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Randall Jarrell’s poetry and criticism have lately experienced individual resurgences. Even his children’s books, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, have proven very popular.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
W. H. Auden is ordinarily depicted as the leading, in fact the best-loved, member of his generation of English poets, the generation falling between the airy heights of T.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Thoughtful readers of poetry are attuned to the musical subtleties of the human voice. These qualities shape the poetry, and most poetry—purely optical or purposely discordant linguistic experiments notwithstanding—should be heard, either as an acoustic mental image, when read silently, or spoken aloud.… continue reading...
(The first in a series on obscure authors and their work.)
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
The Count Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was born in 1838, and it is not extravagant to assert that his destiny was determined by his birth.… continue reading...
A few years ago, for the brief span of a few classes, I attended a poetry workshop class at Boston University. Though I was not formally enrolled in the class, the teacher had generously invited me to attend-and since the teacher was one of the great living masters of the art I accepted, though it necessitated my commuting between California and Massachusetts for several months.… continue reading...
“The letter that is sent is never the letter that is received.” —Lacan
As Reviewed By: Daniel Bosch
Rilke never held a teaching post. We have no cache of syllabi, no workshop guidelines, and though in his letters he expressed quite a lot of readerly enthusiasm, there is no definitive Rilkean reading list, no Rilkean curriculum.… continue reading...
Ariel: The Restored Edition by Sylvia Plath. HarperCollins. 240 pages. $24.95
As Reviewed By: Carol Bere
Sylvia Plath may have passed through the doors of B.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Carol Bere
Seamus Heaney is probably the most universally known Irish poet today.… continue reading...
Voluntary Servitude by Mark Wunderlich. Graywolf Press, 2004.
A Companion for Owls by Maurice Manning. Harcourt, 2004.
shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities by Olena Kalytiak Davis.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
Good Poems. Ed. by Garrison Keillor, Penguin Books, 2002, $15.00
The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classical Tradition in English.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Third Edition), edited by Jahan Ramazani.
… continue reading...Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all th’adulteries of art.
As Reviewed By: Joan Houlihan
Lunch, by D.A. Powell. Wesleyan University Press, 2000. 62 pages. paper, $12.95
Tea, by D.A. Powell. Wesleyan University Press, 1998.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
On the Uses of the New Online Media
… continue reading...We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror. – Marshall McLuhan
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
As Reviewed By: Anthony Moore
Reviewed:
Louise Bogan. Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950. Henry Regnery Company: Chicago, 1951.
Louise Bogan. The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1968. … continue reading...
Belonging, by Dick Davis. Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press, 2002. 54 pages. cloth, $24.95; paper, $14.95.
Landscape with Chainsaw, by James Lasdun.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant
It was a singular moment in the history of Indian letters when A.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ravi Shankar
The world’s largest secular democracy has been exporting its letters in English for a few literary generations, but in the wake of a few luminaries-Rabindranath Tagore or more recently, Arundhati Roy-many strident, lyrical voices have gone unrecognized (after all, this wave of Indian poets and novelists, for all the hype, is still but a ripple in publishing in terms of sheer numbers).… continue reading...
Reviewed: The Cantos by Ezra Pound (Fourth Collected edition). Faber and Faber, 1987.
A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Carroll F. Terrell. University of California Press, 1980.… continue reading...
William Logan’s sixth book of poems, whose binding falls apart on the second reading (shame on you, Penguin), sits atop a pile of even, well-turned work, and it’s worth recapitulating how he got here. … continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Alfred Corn
Oxfordshire: A contingent of scholars from the University of Tulsa has come to Wroxton Abbey, near Banbury, to spend a month in relative seclusion while working on private projects and participating in a series of seminars designed to foster interdepartmental collegiality.… continue reading...
Red Sauce, Whiskey & Snow. FSG, 1996.
Green Sees Things in Waves. FSG, 1999.
Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems 1975-1990. FSG, 2000.
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep.… continue reading...
The Calligraphy Shop by Ben Downing. Zoo Press, 2003. Paper, $14.95. 46 pages.
The Hidden Model by David Yezzi. Triquarterly Books/Northwestern, 2003. Hardcover $39.95; paper, $11.95.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Christopher Bakken
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground…
-William Wordsworth
More than a decade ago, over lunch with a mentor, I was discussing a sonnet sequence I’d been torturing myself and my friends with for months.… continue reading...
As Interviewed By: Christopher Bakken
Interviewer’s Note: Since 1973, Herbert Leibowitz has edited Parnassus: Poetry in Review, maintaining (along with his famously high standards) a publication that has proven essential to contemporary poetry and to those who read and write it.… continue reading...
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
As Reviewed By: Aaron Baker
“The Return of Robert Lowell,” James Fenton titled his recent essay in The New York Review of Books, which invites the question-but where ever did Lowell go?… continue reading...
Crux: The Letters of James Dickey edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman. Knopf, 1999.
James Dickey: The World as a Lie by Henry Hart.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Aaron Baker
“The Return of Robert Lowell,” James Fenton titled his recent essay in The New York Review of Books, which invites the question-but where ever did Lowell go?… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Christopher Bakken
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground…
-William Wordsworth
More than a decade ago, over lunch with a mentor, I was discussing a sonnet sequence I’d been torturing myself and my friends with for months.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: James Rother
Three years ago the Collected Poems everyone was talking about was J.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
Breaking News by Ciaran Carson. Wake Forest University Press, 59 pps.
The Soldiers of the Year II, by Medbh McGuckian. Wake Forest University Press, 130pps.… continue reading...
A.R. Ammons, Collected Poems, 1951-1971. W.W. Norton & Co. $19.95 (paper). 396pp.
A.R. Ammons, A Coast of Trees. W.W. Norton & Co. $11.00 (paper).… continue reading...
The Hidden Model by David Yezzi. Triquarterly, 2003.
Radiance by Joe Osterhaus. Zoo Press, 2002.
As Reviewed by Adam Kirsch
No instruction has ever been so eagerly and doubtfully obeyed as Ezra Pound’s famous “Make it new.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Can Poetry Matter? by Dana Gioia. 10th anniversary edition. Graywolf Press, 2003.
I.
In an introductory note to his first poetry collection, The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940), Randall Jarrell declares: “‘Modern’ poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become.”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Orchards of Syon by Geoffrey Hill. Counterpoint Press, 2002.
Geoffrey Hill is so categorically admired by those who read him regularly (and they do not comprise a great horde) that it seems simply a matter of time before one will begin to hear of a “Hillian corpus” as one sometimes hears of an “Aristophanic corpus”.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
An Introduction to the Uses of Voice Recording in New Electronic Formats
The musical qualities of the spoken voice are thought by many to be the essence of poetry, and it remains true that most poetry is intended to be heard, either as an acoustic mental image or when spoken aloud.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
The Throne of Labdacus by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001
I.
At the height of its rather muted publicity, the new formalism movement-proclaimed by Dana Gioia in the 1980s, and laid out in Linnaean proportions by Mark Jarman and David Mason in Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism-was met with derision by many American poets and with confusion by European poets, few of whom had strayed any great distance from the formal traditions of their forebears.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Brian Henry
The Seven Ages by Louise Glück. Ecco/HarperCollins, $23 cloth. 68 pgs.
Very few lives are interesting, and even fewer are sufficiently interesting to spawn nine books of autobiographical poetry.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Brian Henry
Tremolo by Spencer Short. HarperCollins Perennial, 2001. $13 (paper).
Selected by Billy Collins as a winner in the National Poetry Series competition.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Omaar Hena
The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Helen Vendler. Belknap Press, 1997. $37.39 paperback. 692 pages.
Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets first appeared in 1997 and then in paperback two years later.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: J. K. Halligan
The Invasion Handbook by Tom Paulin. Faber & Faber, 2002.
In the poem “Surveillances”, from his second collection, The Strange Museum (1980), Tom Paulin addressed the anonymous inhabitants of Northern Ireland who made their homes near a prison-
… continue reading...And if you would swop its functions
For a culture of bungalows
And light verse,
You know this is one
Of the places you belong in,
And that its public uniform
Has claimed your service.
As Reviewed By: J. K. Halligan
Invisible Ink by George Starbuck. Edited by Kathryn Starbuck and Elizabeth Meese. The University of Alabama Press, 2002. 82 pp.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings by John Berryman. Edited by John Haffenden. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999. 416 pages.
In the introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare, John Haffenden, the book’s editor and an early biographer of Berryman, admits: “No one who reads this volume will be looking for permanent scholarship: they will be looking for the poet’s reflections on another artist, and for the poet’s critical insights….”… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: William Gibson
Last Poems by James Schuyler. Slow Dancer Poetry, 1999. £7.99
James Schuyler, the Chicago born winner of the 1981 Pulitzer prize, is dead–and has been since 1991.… continue reading...
Black Series by Laurie Sheck. Knopf, 2001.
In the Life of Cowley, Dr. Johnson famously disparages the metaphysical poets, remarking, “Wit, abstracted from its efforts upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors.… continue reading...
The Chime by Cort Day
Alice James Books ($11.95)
A Summer Evening by Geoffrey Nutter
Colorado/Center For Literary Publishing ($14.95)
At some point, poets stopped writing about what they knew and began writing about what they didn’t know (I can’t think of a single good reason to try and pinpoint an exact time period for this; it was a rather gradual change, and the ensuing debate if I got it wrong would be neither productive nor trustworthy).… continue reading...
The Moon and Other Failures by F. D. Reeve. Michigan State University Press, 1999. $17.95 (paper). 65 pages.
The Urban Stampede and Other Poems by F.… continue reading...
The Orchards of Syon by Geoffrey Hill. Counterpoint, 2002. $23.00
I ought, in the interests of full disclosure, to begin with a confession: Geoffrey Hill was my thesis tutor–i.e.,… continue reading...
On the Relation of His Criticism to His Poetry
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
There are two Eliots, the poet and the critic, which bear a curious relation to one another.… continue reading...
Reviewed:
The Roots of Treason by E. Fuller Torrey. McGraw-Hill, 1984. 339 pp.
The Genealogy of Demons by Robert Casillo. Northwestern University Press, 1988. 463 pp.… continue reading...
Futurism, the great European art movement of the early 20th century, found an audience of one in the industrialized new world, and that was Hart Crane.… continue reading...
Click here to read The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot free of charge.
As Reviewed By: Garrick Davis
“I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.”… continue reading...
Post-9/11 Art & Poetry
Last summer, on the subway from Queens to Manhattan, I noticed the woman next to me reading from a stack of binder-clipped pages–the telltale sign of a novel-in-progress.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Peter Campion
Christopher Logue is a knave of the old stripe.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Thousand Wells by Adam Kirsch. Ivan R. Dee, 2002. $18.95.
… continue reading...“It is very likely that the really vital poetry of the next generation will be not about God at all–the poets who currently treat that theme often descend into banality or obscurity–but about other profound and secular themes: love, marriage, loneliness, aging, death.”
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins.
Among the many impediments to which contemporary poets much admit, Dana Gioia wrote in his vital essay “Can Poetry Matter?”… continue reading...
The artistic movement which Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909 with his famous manifesto, which Guillaume Apollinaire would soon call le nouveau esprit, and which quickly spread throughout continental Europe as the last great art fashion, Il Futurismo, never took root in England or America.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles. Grove Press. 294 pages. $24.95.
The byronic images and locales of La Boheme, Giacomo Puccini’s nineteenth-century depiction of classically starving artists in Paris’s Latin Quarter, have come to dominate, rather predictably, portrayals of young artists, writers, and singers: whiskered rogues in whose unwashed ears the muses Aoide, Erato, and very often Melpomene whisper.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert
Collected Poems by James Merrill. Knopf, 2001.
Tribute to James Merrill, April 10, 2001, sponsored by The New School Writing Program & the Academy of American Poets.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Brian Henry
The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets by David Lehman. Doubleday, $27.50 (hardcover). Anchor Books, $16.95 (paper).… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: Brian Henry
Pilots and Navigators by Antony Dunn. Oxford University Press. 55pp. £6.99.
A first book of poetry titled Pilots and Navigators could indicate an adventurous sensibility, a youthful restlessness underpinning the poems.… continue reading...
As Reviewed By: William Gibso
The Sound of Light by John Heath-Stubbs. Carcanet, 1999. 72 pp. £7.99.
I once spent a drunken evening in London with twice short-listed for British Poet Laureate John Heath-Stubbs, OBE.… continue reading...
Reviewed: Madonna anno domini by Joshua Clover. Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
It is often important to understand why an audience acquires certain books, especially when this unmasks a shallowness on our part, or a susceptibility to the slick iconography of marketing departments.… continue reading...
We live in an age awash with bad books. This fact, though that statistical non-entity the average reader may be unaware of it, constitutes the greatest crisis facing literature at the end of this century.… continue reading...
Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire by Diane Ackerman. Harper Collins, 2002. $22.95
Until “poet, essayist, and naturalist” Diane Ackerman, the only celebrity from Waukegan, Illinois able to toss off jokes and fiddle off-key simultaneously was Jack Benny.… continue reading...
