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Swithering BY Robin Robertson Harcourt, $16.00 Shortly into Swithering you intuit you're in grown-up hands, and that the poet is writing from a set of concerns thought hard about before the poems were even begun. To "swither" means to fret or worry—what, exactly, is Robertson in a swither about? About the human fitin nature, is one answer; about the soul's fit in the body, is another. Behind both ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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Other Summers BY Stephen Edgar Black Pepper, Of Australia, David Malouf writes: ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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Decreation BY Anne Carson Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95 And now the alphabet yields a shining whale! Carson has won a formidable array of prizes and is a MacArthur Fellow, but I still remember my first encounter with what I could then only define as the utter strangeness of her sensibility. Not the least of the pleasures in her latest multidisciplinary offering is "Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of ... Read Review by Sandra M. Gilbert >> |
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My Brother is Getting Arrested Again BY Daisy Fried University of Pittsburgh Press, $14.00 If Kevin Connolly presents himself as a tough Guy Noir, Daisy Fried seems destined to pick up on her own name, impersonating a fresh-as-a-daisy, wryly comic ingenue. My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again is her second collection, succeeding She Didn't Mean to Do It, which earned her a number of prizes. A sort of (wo)manifesto, her insouciant "Shooting Kinesha" begins with breezy ... Read Review by Sandra M. Gilbert >> |
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Green Squall BY Jay Hopler Yale University Press, Cloth $30.00; Paper $16.00 Jay Hopler has what musicians call "attack." He enters his poems immediately, and no matter how ironic or strange his sentences become, his voice clamps each phrase to the page with conviction. Here's the beginning of his opening poem, "In the Garden":... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2004 BY David Wojahn University of Pittsburgh Press, $14.00 Reading David Wojahn's superb selected poems, one has two seemingly contrary feelings. First comes the sheer pleasure of surveying Wojahn's range. Here's a poet who can write as convincingly of a backstage interview with Bob Marley as he can of Aeneas's reunion with Anchises in Hades. Wojahn has a fiction writer's talent for building panoramas. But such novelistic pleasure might belie the ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures BY Paul Muldoon Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.00 Paul Muldoon as a lecturer! Well, then we'll catch him at last. Muldoon has been for many years the most elusive of the major mainstream poets, but no butterfly escapes from a lecture hall; somewhere above the old podium and the sweating water glass and the black chair emblazoned with the gold university logo is a net which is destined to fall. ... Read Review by Brian Phillips >> |
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The Totality for Kids BY Joshua Clover The University of Califonia Press, $16.95 As with daffodils and nightingales, postmodernity is only a good subject for lyric poems if a person feels in terms of it. Joshua Clover does. His new book, The Totality for Kids, will give plenty of people who despise po-mo modishness a target for their hatreds, and plenty of theory-kids a fetish object. But it is simply not the book either camp ... Read Review by Dan Chiasson >> |
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Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005 BY Rodney Jones Houghton Mifflin, $25.00 While it's true that most remarkable American poets are infinitely more difficult than Rodney Jones, it does not follow, therefore, that Jones is not remarkable. Unless you think that new poetry cannot be narrative (in the old-fashioned, spell-casting, consecutive way) and cannot be accessible (its action intelligible at first or second reading), Jones is a poet worth taking very seriously indeed. There ... Read Review by Dan Chiasson >> |
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The Whispering Gallery BY William Logan Penguin Poets, $16.00 Placing one foot on either side of the pond, William Logan opens his seventh book with epigraphs from Dickens and Melville (the title comes from Melville, and amusingly was also newspaper-speak for the first transatlantic telegraph link). What follows is an intoxicating wallow in decay seen in the terms of a top-heavy cultural legacy, a procedure ascendant in Logan’s poetry at least ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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Poems 1955-2005 BY Anne Stevenson Dufour Editions, $64.95cloth; $29.95 paper A poet even more essentially transatlantic than Logan, Stevenson was born in England, raised and educated in the US, and has been living in various parts of Britain since the sixties. Poems 1955-2005 draws from thirteen publications since 1965, as well as from some early and late uncollected work. The poems are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which was at first quite ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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War and the Iliad BY Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff with an essay by Hermann Broch. Tr. by Mary McCarthy. Introd. by Christopher Benfey. New York Review Books, $14.95 It was an eerie coincidence. In Marseilles during the late spring of 1942, two writers at the height of their powers, unknown to each other, were both struggling to find a berth on a ship to America and were both thinking about the same poem. Simone Weil had finished her essay on the Iliad two years before, but she still carried the ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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The Georgics of Virgil Tr. by David Ferry Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23.00 No other poem moves the way that Virgil’s Georgics do. The four books contain discrete topics: the cultivation of field crops in the first, of vines and trees in the second, of livestock in the third, and of bees in the fourth. But the poem takes its form as much from those subjects as from the forays the poet makes, venturing along ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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The Rooster’s Wife BY Russell Edson BOA Editions, $14.95 If you’ve read any of Russell Edson’s work, you’ll know precisely what and what not to expect from The Rooster’s Wife, a collection of prose poems that riff on far-out setups like “a woman had given birth to a small pink elephant” or “I ordered ape, and was served monkey.” These gambits then play out on the soundstages of barnyards, households, restaurants, ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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Feminine Gospels BY Carol Ann Duffy Faber and Faber, $11.00 I gather Carol Ann Duffy is the most popular poet in the UK, and the American publication of her seventh (adult) collection may be an opportunity to extend her empire. It could happen: Duffy’s work is so rich that it can’t help but be thoroughly of the place it was written in, but her consistent moxie, her affable rambunctiousness, may well hit ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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Yvor Winters: Selected Poems BY Yvor Winters Ed. by Thom Gunn Library of America, $20.00 In a 1986 essay called “Responsibilities: Contemporary Poetry and August Kleinzahler,” Thom Gunn announced his dissatisfaction with the Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry, edited by Helen Vendler. According to Gunn, Vendler had made the mistake of favoring poets of “anxious urbanity” (like Merrill and Bishop, in Gunn’s view) at the expense of “two of the most important lines of tradition in contemporary ... Read Review by David Orr >> |
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Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems BY Muriel Rukeyser Ed. by Adrienne Rich Library of America, $20.00 If you think of poetry as a kind of specialized social work, then you may agree when Adrienne Rich claims in her introduction to Muriel Rukeyser’s Selected Poems that “the range and daring of [Rukeyser’s] work, its generosity of vision, its formal innovations, and its level of energy are unequalled among twentieth-century American poets.” If you have a different perspective on art ... Read Review by David Orr >> |
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Divide These BY Saskia Hamilton Graywolf Press, However hard I tried, I couldn’t make Saskia Hamilton’s first book, As For Dream, matter much to me. The poems insisted on an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity they couldn’t fill with content: it was like chamber music without the music. And so when I opened her new book to discover the same eency-weency, haiku-like, white-space poems, I thought, “Are we really ... Read Review by Dan Chiasson >> |
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Shadows of Houses BY H. L. Hix Etruscan Press, $15.95 When you read a good poem you admire it; when you read a great poem, you fear it, because something of the original fire of composition has been transmitted. There are many good and admirable poems in H.L. Hix’s Shadows of Houses, and some very good, memorable, teachable poems about the mingled wonders and horrors of living in the world. But there ... Read Review by Dan Chiasson >> |
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A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan BY Louise Bogan Edited by Mary Kinzie Swallow Press, $19.95 There was a time, not so long ago, when the terms “poet” and “critic” weren’t mutually exclusive, and the New Yorker had a poetry reviewer on staff; her name was Louise Bogan, and she held the post for thirty-eight years, retiring in 1969 just months before her death. This book, splendidly edited and introduced by Mary Kinzie, is a selection of Bogan’s ... Read Review by Danielle Chapman >> |
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Bosh and Flapdoodle BY A. R. Ammons W. W. Norton & Company, $22.95 A.R. Ammons’s soaring ambition often produced stunning poems, poems of radiant magnitude and intricate beauty. They reveal a poetic mind of immense power, a mind that could praise the details of the natural world while penetrating the abstractions of infinite space and time. They are poems of great confidence; at their heart is an abiding belief in their own genius, and in ... Read Review by Danielle Chapman >> |
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Budget Travel Through Space and Time BY Albert Goldbarth Graywolf Press, $15.00 "No computer was used in the creation and submission of these poems," says Albert Goldbarth of his latest collection, and it's a splendid irony that a poet with such a mechanistic picture of the cosmos should not avail himself of gadgetry in writing about it. By typewriter or legal pad, evidently, Goldbarth's one-squillionth scale model of the universe proceeds apace. The poet's ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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The Optimist BY Joshua Mehigan Ohio University Press, $12.95 A work of some poise and finish, by turns delicate and robust, making balanced use of the imposing and receptive facets of intelligence, The Optimist is by some margin the best book in this roundup. It's not innovative, but what it does, it does well and very consistently. Mehigan writes with the alert quality control and tonal competence of mid-century Americans like ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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Waltzing Through the Endtime BY David Bottoms Copper Canyon Press, $14.00 David Bottoms is a poet of southern-style suburban pastoral. The woods are a little nearer than Bottoms would like, his sky a little threatening overhead. "Family asleep, I walk my worries into the shallow yard," he writes, in a line that could stand in for much of his work. These poems present the vagabond inner life of a man who's made people ... Read Review by Dan Chiasson >> |
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Refusing Heaven BY Jack Gilbert Alfred A. Knopf, $25.00 Jack Gilbert is a poet of reckless charisma and its aftermaths. I suspect he would like to be seen as a catch-as-catch-can Castiglione, consigned by the waywardness of his imagination to write his canon of manners and gestures in lyric poetry. The poems have the quality of brilliant, searching, addled talk after a wild night out. There's a sort of strung-out sprezzatura ... Read Review by Dan Chiasson >> |
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Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems BY Roddy Lumsden Bloodaxe Books, $23.95 At thirty-eight, Roddy Lumsden is already publishing his selected poems. Mischief Night draws from four books (one unpublished) and some assorted uncollected material, and is nothing if not mischievous: from the take-that solipsism of Roddy Lumsden Is Dead ("My Pain," "My Death," "My Funeral," etc.) to the relentless randiness of The Book of Love, self-deprecation is never far from self-mythologizing, and Lumsden ... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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American Smooth BY Rita Dove W. W. Norton, $22.95 For a book whose advertised theme is ballroom dancing, American Smooth is remarkably unprecious. Dove coolly compares handgun brands (I'm not kidding—"Glocks are lightweight but sensitive; / the Keltec has a long pull and a kick") and, in a good section about African-American troops enlisted with the French in World War I,... Read Review by D. H. Tracy >> |
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Some Values of Landscape and Weather BY Peter Gizzi Wesleyan University Press, $13.95 A micronarratologist, or perhaps a very short historian, could trace the whole course of twentieth-century literary interpretation in the gradual embarrassment of the word "about." It used to go everywhere, in an unbashful nakedness; now it spends half its life shrouded in scare quotes, like an orphan in rags, or Jacob Marley in shackles, and the other half hiding behind some prudent ... Read Review by Brian Phillips >> |
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On the Ground BY Fanny Howe Graywolf Press, $14.00 Fanny Howe's poems fail intellectually, they fail as ideas about poems, before they fail as poems; but the intellectual failure can be harder to notice, as the reader is so seldom in jeopardy of discovering what the poems are about. In her new book, the subject is evidently world politics, or so one surmises from the frequency of words like "history" and ... Read Review by Brian Phillips >> |
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To The City BY John Ash Talisman House, $12.95 John Ash could be the best English poet of his generation. Yet somehow it seems inappropriate to play the old rating game with him. Ash lives as an expatriate in Istanbul, a vantage point from which the machinations of "po-biz" must seem very far away. And that distance isn't merely a geographical fact but a condition of his work. The opening poem ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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Voluntary Servitude BY Mark Wunderlich Graywolf Press, $14.00 There's an entire phalanx of American poets Mark Wunderlich's age (he's in his mid-thirties) who write the way he does. You could even imagine a composite poem. You would be reading it in the New England Review, or maybe, if a number followed the title, in Fence. The lines would fall into a carefully managed form, more ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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Night Street Repairs BY A. F. Moritz House of Anansi Press, $14.95 A. F. Moritz's new poems follow from the poet's moment of reckoning, the vision of emptiness and discontinuity which has left him seeking the barest form of renewal, what he calls in one poem "strange continuance." The work has a feeling of great urgency. These are meditative poems, but they exhibit all the balance and serenity of a car chase: the sentences ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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Music and Suicide BY Jeff Clark Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.00 If you wrote a computer program that translated French Surrealist poetry based on the neural feedback of a squid, you might end up with lines like these:... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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Lives of the Animals BY Robert Wrigley Penguin, $17.00 Robert Wrigley loves the animals—or at least he loves to write poems about them. Wrigley's epigraph for this collection is from D. H. Lawrence, and so is the half of his aesthetic that has to do with primitive carnal urges and actions ("He's got to peel and pull / the hide and hack away her head, section her / mid-spine"). Wrigley's approach ... Read Review by David Orr >> |
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What Is This Thing Called Love BY Kim Addonizio W. W. Norton, $21.95 Kim Addonizio writes plain-spoken, accessible poems in which real things happen to real people, many of them Kim Addonizio. What Is This Thing Called Love weighs in at about a hundred and ten pages, and it covers everything from cancer to alcoholism to ex-boyfriends in a voice that is resolutely conversational—when Addonizio says "you" and "I," she is usually talking about her ... Read Review by David Orr >> |
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Columbarium BY Susan Stewart University of Chicago Press, $22.50 Academic poetry is intelligent but dull; non-academic poetry is dopey but exciting. Fair or not, that's been the rule of thumb for at least half a century, and generally speaking it's suited everyone just fine. For one thing, thinking of poetry in this way gives us a set of ready-made criteria for judgment; for another, it allows us, depending on whether we ... Read Review by David Orr >> |
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Minsk BY Lavinia Greenlaw Faber and Faber, £12.99 A little more than halfway through Lavinia Greenlaw's new book is a poem called "Against Rhetoric," which is the most striking thing in the collection. It presents itself as a reply to Lord Chandos, the fictive Elizabethan poet who, in Hofmannsthal's Ein Brief, explains why he has ceased to write: the world, which once seemed wholly unified, now appears irrevocably divided; experience ... Read Review by Brian Phillips >> |
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For and After BY Christopher Reid Faber and Faber, £l8.99 "Voluminous tits and flashing eyes": with this sanguine expression Christopher Reid introduces the figure of the bargirl in his poem "At the Green Man." You can see why her eyes would flash; it took him five syllables just to look up at them. But the phrase—adapted like the poem itself from Rimbaud's Au Cabaret-Vert—is a clinic in the stale and satisfied tone ... Read Review by Brian Phillips >> |
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The Cradle Place BY Thomas Lux Houghton Mifflin, $22.00 Thomas Lux's nineteenth book of poems, The Cradle Place, turns poetry into performance. Lux must have found a method while writing the previous eighteen collections: for all his crankiness and swagger, he whisks each of the poems down the page with inveterate ease, like Johnny Carson swinging his invisible chipping wedge. Some of the entertainment value comes from true talent. Lux has ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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Famous Americans BY Loren Goodman Yale University Press, $24.95 In his preface to this book, W. S. Merwin makes a strange assertion. "[C]omedy," he writes, has been "absent from poetry for ages at a time, as though it had been banned." Now, perhaps Merwin had a particular age in mind when he wrote this sentence, when comic poetry was nowhere to be found. He does not list one, and I cannot ... Read Review by Brian Phillips >> |
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Soft Sift BY Mark Ford Harcourt, $23.00 "As I emerged from my hip-bath it suddenly dawned / The facts might be remarshalled and shown to rhyme," Mark Ford writes, and a longing for coherent form, for a means of remarshalling the mayhem of the facts into rhyming order, is at the heart of his splendid and difficult new book. But the desperate and hapless characters who inhabit Ford's poems ... Read Review by Brian Phillips >> |
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The Soldiers of Year II BY Medbh McGuckian Wake Forest University Press, $19.95 The poems in Medbh McGuckian's The Soldiers of Year II have a strong sense of inevitability. Even in the poet's more impressionist moments, each word has palpable weight. This gravity allows the poet to make startling departures without ever losing her reader. For while she appeals to a collective sense of Irish history, McGuckian colors her lines with disjunctive sentence structure, dream ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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Hazmat BY J. D. McClatchy Alfred A. Knopf, $15.00 Poetry critics should agree to a moratorium on the word "mandarin." Like "suburban," "confessional," or "self-styled avant-garde," the label smears the poets while allowing the critics to keep their hands clean. Because of his eloquence and formal grace, J. D. McClatchy has often had to wear this dubious badge. But the "m" word would be especially inappropriate to Hazmat, the poet's fifth ... Read Review by Peter Campion >> |
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