That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers.… continue reading...
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...
The poems in this weighty volume are too numerous and ponderous to summarize in a review. Some of them date from more than a dozen years ago.… continue reading...
As you know, the West Chester University Poetry Conference is going on a one-year hiatus in 2015.
We are writing to let you know that Western State Colorado University has generously enabled us to fill this gap year by inviting you to our conference, Writing the Rockies, which will take place from Wednesday, July 22 to Sunday, July 26, at our campus in Gunnison, Colorado.… continue reading...
Of all the literary scenes
Saddest this sight to me:
The graves of little magazines
Who died to make verse free.
— Keith Preston
It is impossible to tell the story of modern American poetry without examining the role of little magazines.… continue reading...
When I tell people I teach and – God help me – even write poetry, they often say, “I wish you could explain modern poetry to me.… continue reading...
David Kalstone, a longtime professor of English at Rutgers University and, prior to that, at Harvard, was one of James Merrill’s closest friends. An expert on Sir Philip Sidney, Kalstone extensively studied 20th-century Americans as well; his second book Five Temperaments (1977) included a chapter on Merrill along with Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery.… continue reading...
“The Broken Home” is a sequence of seven sonnets that appeared in Merrill’s 1966 volume Nights and Days. The sonnets are connected by imagery, themes and autobiography, concerning, as they do, two central issues: the trauma of Merrill’s parents’ divorce and the poet’s own incomplete or “broken” childless home.… continue reading...
The young James Merrill first saw Greece in 1950 as part of a two-and-a-half-year long European tour, a trip he would later detail in his memoir A Different Person.… continue reading...
Birds of the Air, by David Yezzi, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2013
Lord Byron’s Foot, by George Green, St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, IN, 2012
Shadows and Gifts, by Quincy R.… continue reading...
Interviewer’s Note: Born in 1950, William Logan is a professor of English at the University of Florida, where he teaches in the MFA program. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry and five books of criticism, including The Undiscovered Country, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.… continue reading...
James Merrill’s final book of poems, A Scattering of Salts, was written in his last years as his health was in steady decline after having been diagnosed with HIV.… continue reading...
Merrill scholarship has been undergoing a sea change, apparently mirroring a larger societal change. What among scholars even in the 1990s could but delicately speak its name, now does so frankly.… continue reading...
James Matthew Wilson reviews two books by David J. Rothman, The Book of Catapults (White Violet Press, 2013) and Part of the Darkness (Entasis Press, 2013)
In the last several years, David Rothman has established a reputation as the great enthusiast of poetic form.… continue reading...
James Merrill has given us the birth-myth of his poem, “Losing the Marbles.” After decades of spending his winter months in Athens, Greece, Merrill wintered instead in Key West, where, in 1985,
… continue reading...“… we were talking about memory lapses, a topic increasingly relevant to everyone present.
In “Investiture at Cecconi’s,” James Merrill weaves a beautiful, sapphic fabric whose warp and weft intertwine chiaroscuro threads of fate, epiphany, beauty, and death as the expression of an initiation into the realm of living with and dying from AIDS.… continue reading...
The Book of Ephraim is a very “literary” work and perhaps never more so than in its Venetian sections (V and W). It is my contention that Section V (the letter V, not the Roman numeral) constitutes not only a major turning-point in the work, but also a significant declaration of Merrill’s literary aims.… continue reading...
“Family week at Oracle Ranch” is a portrait of dysfunction. It’s a poem written later in Merrill’s life, appearing in his final book, A Scattering of Salts, published by Knopf in 1995, the same year that Merrill died (February 6, 1995).… continue reading...
James Merrill is one of those poets whom everybody (well, everybody in the literary world) knows but whom few have read—or, at least, few have read at length or in depth.… continue reading...
This is the 10th installment in the “Role of the Poet-Critic” series, which includes interviews with Dana Gioia, William Logan, Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt, Christian Wiman, Timothy Steele, William Jay Smith, and Rachel Hadas.… continue reading...
Editor’s Note: Marcus Bales responded to the CPR’s recent series of articles on Richard Blanco’s Inaugural reading with this poem.
Identity Poetical by Marcus Bales
Identity Poet:
I am the very model of identity poetical,
My bio and my craftsmanship are blankly antithetical.… continue reading...
Perhaps the most surprising feature of Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, “One Today,” is that hardly anyone took notice. In the week after the inauguration, the blogosphere was eerily quiet in regard to the poem.… continue reading...
Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem, “One Today,” sucked. Take the first stanza, which manages to be at once portentous, vaguely imperialistic, and dull:
… continue reading...One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
John F. Kennedy’s request that Robert Frost read at his inauguration had no precedent in United States history, but, in retrospect, appears rather predictable. The 86-year-old writer was already “the embodiment of American poetry,” as Jay Parini puts it in his biography. … continue reading...
Until recently, Dennis O’Driscoll was among the few living poets I most wanted to meet. He was also the only such poet whose writings I barely knew.… 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...
It is nearly twenty-five years since Joseph Epstein published his now famous essay—or as Dana Gioia referred to it, his “mordant 1988 critique”—under the flashy title “Who Killed Poetry?”… 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...
I teach Hardy every other year in my “Modern British Poetry“ course at Wells College, and this year I decided to use “The Darkling Thrush” to introduce his work to students, many of whom had not read him before.… continue reading...
Click here (and scroll to the bottom of the page) to read the poem sequence.
I’d like to start by making a claim that I have recently asserted elsewhere: The lyric poem is fundamentally elegiac.… continue reading...
On April 15, 1912, on her maiden voyage, the British steamer Titanic, the world’s largest and most luxurious ship, struck an iceberg in mid-Atlantic and sank.… continue reading...
… continue reading...“Effulgent” by David M. Katz
Part seemed she of the effulgent thought —“Her Initials,” Thomas Hardy
Glitter, brilliance, candor, dazzle;
Luster, splendor, lambent lightness;
She evokes a lucid ghazal
All shot through with flashing brightness:
Of those words, he chose “effulgent.”
How can you account for the love you have for a favorite poem? One way is simply to say that it sparks personal associations for you.… continue reading...
When beginning to think about the poem “During Wind and Rain” by Thomas Hardy, I thought it might be useful to go back for some context to the old pessimist Yvor Winters, who always had provocative things to say about form. … continue reading...
Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Last Signal” is one of his finest elegies. That is already saying a good deal, since a great many of his poems could be defined as elegiac in tone, if not actually in strict form.… continue reading...
Thomas Hardy is still far better known as a novelist than he is as a poet. Although certain poems have lodged themselves where, as Frost put it, they will be hard to get rid of, there is still a widespread conviction that much of his poetry is either awkward, difficult or just downright bad.… 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...
This is the ninth installment in the “Role of the Poet-Critic” series, which includes interviews with Dana Gioia, William Logan, Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt, Christian Wiman, Timothy Steele, William Jay Smith, and Rachel Hadas.… continue reading...
I didn’t know, when the Contemporary Poetry Review published my essay review on Daryl Hine this January, that the poet was in ill health, and certainly couldn’t guess that he would die within a year of that piece appearing.… continue reading...
An excerpt from “The Last of the Dandies”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1862
Article unsigned
“Who is Captain Gronow?”
He is the last of the “Dandies” of the Regency of George IV.;… continue reading...
Of all the modern poets of France who claimed noble birth—and many did so, by inserting de before their last name as a literary and social affectation—only two indisputably had that right: Villiers de L’isle-Adam and Robert de Montesquiou.… continue reading...
A section of “Beau Brummell” from Miscellaneous Works Volume I: Habits and Men by John Doran (1857)
… continue reading...I scorn to crowd among the muddy throng
Of the rank multitude, whose thicken’d breath
(Like to condensed fogs) do choke the beauty
Which else would dwell in every kingdom’s cheek.
We look upon Beau Brummell as the greatest of small wits. Indeed, he may in this respect be considered, as Cowley says of Pindar as “a species alone,” and as forming a class by himself.… continue reading...
“Beau Brummell” from Eccentric Personages by W. Russell (1864)
It is a solemn truth that every death-bed is the final scene of a great tragedy, though the death be a beggar’s, the bed one of straw.… continue reading...
An Excerpt from Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1828)
1.) Do not require your dress so much to fit, as to adorn you.… continue reading...
It is not until the reign of that frustrated artist and unsurpassed egotist, Nero, that we again recognize the true dandy, so insolent in repose, embodied in the fragmentary figure of Gaius Petronius (Arbiter).… continue reading...
The first literary dandy of whom we still have record was Plato—who was unquestionably the greatest “exquisite” of his day. This will strike most modern readers as astonishing or inconceivable but it is neither for those who know their Greek.… continue reading...
When was man first freed from the drudgery of earning his income? And who was the first to dedicate himself to the art of living well?… continue reading...
We have all heard the story of an aged Pablo Neruda at a poetry reading, turning down a request to perform a poem from the earlier days of his career, citing a failing memory. … 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...
(Here’s a salute to Creative Writing programs from our poets and critics, past and present, culled from various interviews and essays.)
“Abolish the M.F.A.! What a ringing slogan for a new Cato: Iowa delenda est!”… continue reading...
I have attended dozens of poetry readings. Virtually all of them were identical:
• The introductions made me think I was about to witness the second coming of John Donne.… 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...
When Solon declared that he learned something new every day (or was it Pericles?—some dead Greek guy, at any rate), he perhaps was not thinking of the utility of the Pratt-Shelby Knot when trying to keep a leather tie proportional enough that the thin end does not emerge at an inconvenient and insistent angle.… 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...
Last July, a distinguished group of poets who are also critics gathered at Western State College of Colorado, in Gunnison, for the Second Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism.… continue reading...
Those who condemn form in poetry are often given to venting their wrath upon…received forms, and often chiefly on the grounds that they coerce the mind, limit the imagination, force language with Procrustean barbarity into set molds.… continue reading...
When I was seventeen years old and barely aware of poetry, with no idea what good poetry might be, or even what if anything might please me, a friend, just back from his English class, rushed breathlessly into my room at boarding school, book in hand, and cried, “Listen to this!”… continue reading...
After his reading, the poet was approached by a tearful woman. She thanked him for the poem about his brother who had died. “My brother died recently,” she said, “and I sympathize with your feelings about your brother’s death.”… 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...
Stand-up comedian Tony Campanelli confessed Monday to the Feb. 26 killing of 180 comedy-club patrons during a performance at Crack-Ups in Royal Oak. . . .… 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...
(Author’s note: No science was involved in the writing of this essay; nor was there any systematic process of interviews. No, this is based on firm anecdotal evidence, told to me by various poets in various stages of sobriety over the course of several years, as well as my own experiences since my first book appeared in 2008.… continue reading...
The present survey is provisional and intended to serve as only the merest introduction to a vast and extraordinarily complex field, one that commands broad, ongoing attention.… 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...
In considering “the unspoken rules of book reviewing,” the editors came across David Wheatley’s superb essay on poet-critics (originally published in CPR a number of years ago) and decided to reprint a section of it (modified only by numbered bullets for emphasis).… 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...
The CPR editors recently received the following note from the Italian scholar Massimo Bacigalupo:
… continue reading...Dear Scholars of Ezra Pound and Modernism:
I thought you’d like to know that the house where Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound
lived in Sant’Ambrogio di Zoagli, above Rapallo, is for sale.
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...
The Unspoken Rules of Book Reviewing: A Guide for Beginners
Rule 1: Only review a book if you can be impartial about it—that is, only review a book toward which you feel nothing. … continue reading...
Recently, Andrew Feld posted the following comment on Joan Houlihan’s review of Christian Wiman’s latest book of poems:
Without addressing the substance of this review, it does seem problematic to me that it is written by a poet whose most recent book was given a hugely unfavorable review in the journal edited by Christian Wiman.… continue reading...
In a review copy of Norman Stock’s new collection, Pickled Dreams Naked (NYQ Books), we came across the first honest poem we’ve ever read about poetry readings.… continue reading...
1. Precursors / chronological by country
A) England
Gascoigne, George. “Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English…” In The Posies of George Gascoigne.… continue reading...
Few fields have ever been transformed by bibliographical work in the way that literary prosody was changed by the publication of T. V. F. Brogan’s English Versification, 1570 – 1980: A Reference Guide with a Global Appendix (or “EVRG” to its admirers). … continue reading...
The editors of the CPR wish to thank our readers for their comments, and letters, on the subject of “poetry readings.” Our very short and sarcastic list created a tiff among a number of “the touchy tribe” who seemed to take offense at the notion that all contemporary poetry readings are not wonderfully entertaining events.… 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...
Five Lessons from AWP: Or, Why We Hate Poetry Readings
1) You should recite your poetry, not read it.
2) If you can’t recite your poetry, then you can’t remember your poetry.… 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...
(An Occasional Series: Part One)
Poems reviewed in this article:
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: The Halo Rule by Teresa Leo. Elixir Press, 2008.
Teresa Leo possesses what a previous generation of critics would have termed an incoherent sensibility. This is not intended to denigrate.… continue reading...
District and Circle by Seamus Heaney. FSG, 2006. 76 pages.
Digging for Poems
I fancy I know more about Seamus Heaney’s back than anyone not related to him.… continue reading...
The 2nd Annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism on July 28-30, 2011
To be held at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado
Founded by Jan Schreiber and David J.… continue reading...
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...
In 2008, Horace Engdahl, chair of the Swedish Academy that awards the Noble Prize Committee in Literature, made a fair point when he said that Americans “don’t translate enough,” as one of the reasons why few Americans are on the short list for the prize.… 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...
1. MAKING SOUL
Two days after my birth I arrived at my grandparents’ stone house on the plains. Around us ripe wheat spread across swaying prairie, and words rose from the fields offering themselves to my grandparents’ mouths by way of the King James Bible.… continue reading...
mong literary arts, poetry places the greatest emphasis on the organization of the musical effects of language: rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and onomatopoeia, along with such elements as ambiguity, and even exuberant nonsense.… continue reading...
– Paul Valéry
“Thought tends to collect in pools.”
– Wallace Stevens
Ordinary readers, literary editors, and some English professors confront an inescapable question of judgment: In principle, is it possible, faced with an overwhelming body of work in print, to cull out excellent poems in the way one can cull out fine diamonds or superb soufflés?… continue reading...
Time was when there was too much criticism around. Randall Jarrell thought so, when, in the early Fifties, he pronounced it “the bane of our age.”… continue reading...
The six papers which will appear this week in the CPR were all delivered on July 31, 2010, at the first annual Western State College Seminar on Poetry Criticism, in Gunnison, Colorado. … 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.
The fashion world is enjoying the anonymous posts coming from Fuck Yeak Menswear, where each daily post “responds” to a fashion photograph with hilarious, egotistical doggerel that reminds this reader of nothing so much as a clothes-obsessed rap star working on the lyrics to B-sides that will never see the light of day.… continue reading...
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...
While far from being the most ambitious and successful poem in The Whitsun Weddings, “Broadcast” seems to me in many ways among the most essentially Larkinesque of Philip Larkin’s poems, and at the same time the most uncharacteristically romantic.… continue reading...
I have two of Philip Larkin’s poems by heart—“Sad Steps” and “Aubade”—though I admire many more, and it was while reciting the former poem silently to myself during a particularly boring meeting that I noticed a number of things for the first time, most of them related in one way or another to the poet’s use of adjectives:
… continue reading...Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
For those familiar with Philip Larkin’s work, the title of this short essay will seem to offer a juxtaposition so improbable as to be laugh-out-loud funny-rather like that old joke staple, the tiny book titled German Humor, or the admittedly unlikely prospect of a panel at a New Formalist conference on “The Achievement of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E Poets.”… continue reading...
Reviewed: Azores by David Yezzi. Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2008.
Poets and critics alike must resist being swayed by their own rhetoric. In a critic this results in imprecision, emotion, and incoherence.… continue reading...
Reviewed: James Agee: Selected Poems. Edited by Andrew Hudgins. American Poets Project: The Library of America, $20.
The next time you visit a bookstore, please look through the poetry selection.… 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.”
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...
III
… continue reading...O early ripe! To thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.
II
… continue reading...
Marble staircases climb the hills where derelict estates
glimmer in the river-brightened dusk . . .
And some are merely left to rot where now
broken stone lions guard a roofless colonnade .
… continue reading...While arguing amid the colonnades,
Tired in the noon-day by the badly taught,
Or resting, dubious, in the laurel shades
I have impinged upon a firmer thought.
Note: “The Slow Pacific Swell” may be found in many volumes of Winters’s work, including Collected Poems (1960); The Poetry of Yvor Winters (1978); and The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters (1999).… continue reading...
I first wrote about Franz Wright’s poetry while working as poetry editor of Random House’s online magazine, Bold Type. Upon publication of his first book with Knopf, The Beforelife, I contacted him for an interview.… continue reading...
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...
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: Ernest Hilbert
Stephen Spender’s World Within World is as much a reconsideration, a critique, of the art of autobiography as it is an autobiography.… continue reading...
