Contemporary Poetry Review

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,

“… 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:

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...

“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...

Read the poem here.

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)

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:

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...

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—

There is no consolation in the thought of God,

he said, slamming another nail

in another house another havoc had half-taken.

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. The Tyranny of Narrative

A simple Google search for the phrase “against narrative” will lead you to any number of websites in which someone declares that narrative is tyranny of some sort.… 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...

Robert Benchley, the actor, critic and member of the Algonquin Wits, once quipped that “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.” … continue reading...

“Building my work, I build myself.”

–  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.

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...

One of several enticements of the internet for a literary magazine, as for any enterprise, is the ease with which information may be conveyed, stored, and distributed.… 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...

Philip Larkin’s 1964 volume, The Whitsun Weddings, contains two poems describing train-journeys. One of them is the volume’s title-poem and is one of the most famous (and best-loved) poems in English since the Second World War; it has been said that with this work he brought a whole new English landscape into poetry.… 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...

Why Quality Control in Poetry Need Not Be Blindsided by Traditionalism

As Reviewed By: James Rother

For decades now, responsible elements within the critical community have disagreed over how to save American poetry from itself.… 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...

A Poem by Jayanta Mahapatra

[private]








[/private]… 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...

By: Stephen Schwartz

This is an intensely personal, and elliptical, and non-Aristotelian story.

As a young man I looked for a poem, afraid I could not find it. … continue reading...

By: Stephen Schwartz

On March 7, the North American poet Philip Lamantia, the only successful English-language versifier in the French surrealist style to appear in this hemisphere, died of heart failure in San Francisco, his native city, at 77.… 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...

By: Jan Schreiber

The task of the critic is judgment. I hope to unravel the complexities of judgment, as it applies to works of literature, and specifically to poetry.… 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...

By: Justin Quinn

The main transformations in American literature over the last thirty years have had a strong effect on poetry as well: the consolidation of African-American writers, the emergence of Native-American, Asian-American and Chicano writers, as well as gay writers, to name but a few.… 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...

Ledbury Poetry Festival, July 2004

By: Anthony Moore

I wish Edward Thomas (that poet) were here to ponder gulfs in general with me as in the days when he and I tired the sun with talking on the footpaths and stiles of Ledington and Ryton (Robert Frost, “A Romantic Chasm”)

Those days, at the start of World War I, were among the eleven convivial months when Frost lived near Dymock, in England’s rural Gloucestershire.… 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...

An inadequate but serviceable list

As Compiled By: Preston Merchant

Only the Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections from Kamala Das

Das stopped writing poetry recently after converting to Islam, though she had been called “the first Hindu woman to write honestly about sexual feelings and love.” … 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...

Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)

By: Preston Merchant

After Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001, of brain cancer, Tehelka, an Indian website, presented an online tribute by his friends and admirers.… 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...

By: Paul Lake

In 1935 in his essay “Religion and Literature,” T. S. Eliot described his era as one in which readers had “never heard the Christian faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism.” … continue reading...

By: Paul Lake

Despite nearly a century’s advances in science, technology, linguistics, and our understanding of human development and cognition, Freud’s Oedipal myth provides the intellectual cornerstone for postmodern literary analysis as well as the chief impetus for avant-garde experimentation in the arts.… continue reading...

By: Paul Lake

Increasingly over the past few decades, as postmodern critical theories have percolated from the academy down to the general culture, the prestige of literature has declined.… continue reading...

By Paul Lake

At present, the term “free verse” is used to describe a multitude of quite different and even contradictory strategies, several of which may be employed in the same poem.… continue reading...

by Paul Lake

In one of his most memorable pronouncements, written in 1917 at a time when he was championing free verse, Ezra Pound made a classic statement about the shape of poetry:

I think there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase.… 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

Part 8: Robert Lowell

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...

His Plain Far-Reaching Singleness

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:

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

[private]her night thoughts

My baby wails. That I may rest

I offer him a rubber breast

And soon as waves by oil suppressed,

He quiets. An underhanded trick

Yet practical and politic-

He cries for bread.… continue reading...

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp.,

Editor’s Note
The Contemporary Poetry Review is pleased to publish selected letters to the magazine, some of which have been edited for content and clarity. The editor can be contacted here.… 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...

Word Comix by Charlie Smith. Norton, 2009.

The History of Forgetting by Lawrence Raab. Penguin, 2009.

Blind Rain by Bruce Bond. Louisiana State University Press, 2008.… continue reading...

On “Born Yesterday”

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...

As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber

The task of the critic is judgment. I hope to unravel the complexities of judgment, as it applies to works of literature, and specifically to poetry.… continue reading...

W. H. Auden’s engagement with the poetry of Byron is perhaps not the most significant of his various literary relationships; probably not as important as that with W.B.… continue reading...

On British and American Poetry

What is the difference between British and American poetry—especially contemporary poetry—and why are they different? Because the two poetries are written in the same language, it seems to make more sense to ask this question of them than to ask, for example, what the differences between Italian and Spanish poetry are, or to what degree Polish poetry differs from Russian poetry.… 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...

Interviewer’s Note: Born in New York City, Rachel Hadas was educated at Radcliffe College (Classics), The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (poetry), and Princeton (Comparative Literature), as well as by living on a Greek island for several years in the early 1970’s. … 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...

On Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day”
As Reviewed By: Robert Bernard Hass

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...

More than half a century has elapsed since Richard Wilbur, still prolific at 87, won his first Pulitzer Prize. The extraordinary qualities of that statement should be highlighted for readers who claim there are no incontrovertible giants on the American poetry scene.… 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.

 “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...

II.

Unnamed ghosts trouble Baxter as much as those he addresses specifically; when local and personal history intermingle in the Jerusalem Sonnets, crises of faith tend to arise, as in the twenty-fifth sonnet:

The brown river, te taniwha, flows on .

About the Size of It by Tom Disch. Anvil Press Poetry Ltd, 2007.

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...

About the Size of It by Tom Disch. Anvil, 160 pages, $16.95

As Reviewed By: Eric Ormsby

It takes a brave poet these days to praise the beauties of obesity.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar

“A spiritual life doesn’t require taking Holy Orders, only a decision to submit to a lifelong discipline.”
— Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008

Few American poet-critics since Edgar Allan Poe have brought a practitioner’s knowledge of writing genre fiction to the service of poetry reviewing.… continue reading...

Thomas M. Disch. The Priest: A Gothic Romance. Alfred A. Knopf 1995. 352 pp.

Tom Disch. Dark Verses & Light. The Johns Hopkins University Press 1991.… continue reading...

Interviewer’s note: William DeWitt Snodgrass is commonly credited with inaugurating the “confessional” era in American poetry in 1959 with his first collection, Heart’s Needle. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and there is evidence that it influenced Robert Lowell’s own pioneering collection Life Studies.… continue reading...

On Frank Sargeson’s wall, up above the fireplace, there used to be (perhaps there still is) a wooden cross . . . . One day I found among cards and pictures on the shelf above the fireplace a photograph of the young Baxter in his alcoholic raincoat.… continue reading...

Nigh-No-Place by Jen Hadfield. Bloodaxe Books, 2008
As Reviewed By: Hannah Brooks-Motl

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...

William Jay Smith is the author of more than sixty books of poetry, children’s verse, literary criticism, memoirs, translations, and editor of several influential anthologies. From 1968 to 1970 he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a post now called the Poet Laureate) and two of his twelve collections of poetry were finalists for the National Book Award. … 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...

An Interview with X. J. Kennedy

By: Ernest Hilbert

X. J. Kennedy was born in Dover, NJ in 1929, the son of a boiler factory timekeeper.… continue reading...

Peeping Tom’s Cabin: Comic Verse 1928-2008, by X. J. Kennedy. BOA Editions, 2007. $17.00pb.

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...

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2007 by X. J. Kennedy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Reviewed By: Catherine Tufariello

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...

Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008, 758 pp., $45. Published originally, Faber & Faber, UK, 2007, £30.… continue reading...

III

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

         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 .

Book of the Year: Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson (Modern Library).

This one is unavoidable. You can’t get around it. You have to go through it.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Jack Foley

Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems. Edited by Charles Bernstein. American Poets Project/The Library of America, 2006.

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.

In Memoriam: Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)

As Reviewed By: Preston Merchant

When Anthony Hecht first came to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference to teach a summer workshop in the early 1990’s, one of his students was particularly eager to meet him.… 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.   

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...

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Travel Writing and the Canon

Like many odd literary creatures from the British 1930’s, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland (1936) is referred to more frequently as a representative period piece than as an achieved work of art.… continue reading...

Just as Ben Jonson bore the unfortunate fate of living in what would become known as the “Age of Shakespeare,” Louis MacNeice lives in the long shadow thrown by his exact contemporary, W.H.… continue reading...

An Interview with Jon Stallworthy

Interview By: Sunil Iyengar

Jon Stallworthy’s blood quickened after a poetry reading he gave earlier this year, not because he admired his own recitative powers, but because of something an audience member told him.… continue reading...

Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice edited by Peter McDonald. Faber and Faber, 2007. 836 pages.

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...

As Reviewed By: John Drexel

“The Sunlight on the Garden” by Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden

Hardens and grows cold,

We cannot cage the minute

Within its nets of gold;

When all is told

We cannot beg for pardon.

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...

As Reviewed By: John Drexel

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?

Harbour Lights by Derek Mahon. The Gallery Press, 2005.

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...

Interviewer’s note: X.J. Kennedy has written that Erica Dawson “is the most exciting younger poet I’ve seen in years. What drive and verve! Even in lines under tight control, she can sound reckless.… 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:

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...

As Reviewed By: David Yezzi

There is an anecdote, too good not to be true, recounted by William Jay Smith, about a soused Hart Crane sidling up to the poet Witter Bynner in Mexico City and hissing, “Witter Bynner, you’re going to have a bitter winter.”… 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...

As Reviewed by: Paul Lake

Donald Davie’s In the Stopping Train appeared in 1977, the year I was accepted into Stanford University’s writing program, where he taught.… 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...

Notes from the Nation’s Poetry Festival

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...

Book of the Year: Not for Specialists: New & Selected Poems by W. D. Snodgrass (BOA Editions).

What happened to Snodgrass? After winning the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for his first book, the “confessional school” landmark Heart’s Needle, his career stalled.… 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.

If I were Lord Byron,

I’d write you, sweet siren,

A poem inspirin’…

A killer-dilleroo!

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...

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.

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...

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp.,

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp.,

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp.,

As Reviewed By: John Drexel

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...

Here, Bullet by Brian Turner. Alice James Books, 2005.

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...

I 

Early in 1941, as British forces were pushing Italian tanks back into Libya and spoiling Mussolini’s dreams of becoming a full member to the Axis powers, Ezra Pound was hard at work in Rapallo, pushing dreams of his own.… continue reading...

Book of the Year: The Collected Poems (1943-2004) of Richard Wilbur (Harcourt)

Runners-Up: Safest by Michael Donaghy (Picador)

Who is the greatest living American poet?… 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...

As Reviewed By: John Drexel

Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry by Dana Gioia. University of Michigan Press, 2003. Paper: $16.95

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…. 

Interviewer’s Note: Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1948, Timothy Steele is the author of several collections of poems: Uncertainties and Rest (Louisiana State University Press, 1979), Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems (Random House, 1986), and The Color Wheel (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).… continue reading...

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

Part 9: Anne Sexton

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

Part 7: Five American Women Poets

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

Part 6: James Merrill

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

Part 5: John Ashbery

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

Part 4: Elizabeth Bishop

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

Part 3: Sylvia Plath

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

Part 2: Randall Jarrell

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

Part 1: W. H. Auden

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

A Series on Recorded Poetry

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...

Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 by Seamus Heaney. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002.

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...

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...

In Memoriam: Donald Justice (1925-2004)

As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar

I

Thumbing at leisure through Donald Justice’s poems, one encounters several worthy candidates for an imagined memorial reading.… continue reading...

Book of the Year: The Collected Poems of Donald Justice (Knopf)

Runner-Up: Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz (Ecco). Inner Voices: Selected Poems by Richard Howard (FSG).… continue reading...

Hugh Kenner (1923-2003)

As Reviewed By: James Rother

Just barely octogenarian (but grown wispy), Hugh Kenner, like the Romantic correspondent breeze he so adamantly eschewed in the prolonged swath through modernist studies he cut like a mighty wind, slipped away a year ago this past month, a legend diminished but certainly not obscured by the marginalizations heaped upon him in recent years.… continue reading...

Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht. Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Collected Later Poems by Anthony Hecht. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber

For years I resisted the temptation to sum up Anthony Hecht’s work as a single, completed whole.… continue reading...

Thomson William “Thom” Gunn (1929-2004)

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

It will be frequently remarked elsewhere that the past year saw many fine poets cross the bar, but only one of them devoted huge energies to poems about young men crossing barroom floors.… continue reading...

Michael Donaghy (1954-2004)

As Reviewed By: Katy Evans-Bush

Imagine growing up in a society where one’s first and only experience of music occurred in a schoolroom, where the beauty of music was meticulously analysed and explained to you and where you were judged by your ability to explain it in turn.

In Memoriam: Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

As Reviewed By: Christopher Bakken

In Letters from an American Farmer, frontier agrarian J. Hector St. John de Crevècoeur posits that

Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow.

Here

in the dusty malarial lanes

of Cuttack where years have slowly lost their secrets

they wander

in these lanes nicked by intrigue and rain

and the unseen hands of gods

in front of a garish temple of the simian Hanuman

along river banks splattered with excreta and dung

in the crowded market square among rotting tomatoes

fish-scales and the moist warm odour of bananas and piss

passing by the big-breasted, hard-eyed young whores

who frequent the empty space behind the local cinema

by the Town Hall where corrupt politicians still

go on delivering their pre-election speeches

and on the high road above the town’s burning-ground

from which gluttonous tan smoke floats up

in the breeze, smacking of scorched marrow and doubt.… continue reading...

Stray Thoughts from a Failed Experiment

As Reviewed By: J. S. Renau

1.

I should begin by saying that, concerning the education of the poet, the special focus for this issue of CPR, I am deeply conflicted.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Marc Pietrzykowski

I. Forget About Marketing

F. T. Marinetti’s publication of the Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro on Feb. 20, 1909, managed to shock its readers by melding a traditional form-the individual or collaborative statement of disputation against an orthodoxy-with the language of Revolution, or, as it was later called, Marketing:

“Look at us!

An Unscientific Survey of MFA Graduates

As Interviewed By: Joan Houlihan

Brown University, University of Iowa, early to mid-90’s

1. What did you learn in your MFA studies that has advanced your development as a poet-and that you believe you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere?… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Joan Houlihan

In the dark age of poetry, the pre-MFA era, when poets were untethered to a clear identity, often unhinged, and wandering loose in a society inimical to their aims, they were forced to brood in out-of-the-way cafés and corners, bringing forth from their painful rubbings against society’s strictures their secret image-pearls without benefit of community or support of other pearl-producers.… continue reading...

An Interview with the Editors of Foetry

Conducted by: Garrick Davis

Interviewer’s Note: This year, a new website was launched in the National Poetry Month of April-not to publish poetry or fiction, but to examine the ethics of the poetry world.… 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.

I.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Third Edition), edited by Jahan Ramazani.

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

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.

Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.

As Reviewed By: Anthony Moore

I.… 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...

As Reviewed By: John Drexel

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...

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...

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...

As Interviewed By: Rabindra Swain
& Preston Merchant

Jayanta Mahapatra was born in 1928 in Cuttack, in the Indian state of Orissa. Trained as a scientist, he taught college physics for thirty-six years.… continue reading...

an inadequate but serviceable list

As Compiled By: Preston Merchant[private]

Only the Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections from Kamala Das

Das stopped writing poetry recently after converting to Islam, though she had been called “the first Hindu woman to write honestly about sexual feelings and love.”… 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...

A Meditation on Pilgrimage and Poetry

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...

Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.

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...

Parnassus: Poetry in Review

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...

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...

Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.

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...

Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.

As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar

I.… continue reading...

Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.

As Reviewed By: James Rother

Three years ago the Collected Poems everyone was talking about was J.… continue reading...

Book of the Year: The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (FSG)

Runners-Up: The Collected Poems of Ted Hughes, edited by Paul Keegan (FSG); “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate (FSG)

The story of the year was summed up in two words: Robert Lowell.… 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...

In the world of American poetry, getting a call from Dana Gioia is like getting blessed by the Pope. This spring, I received that benediction when he invited me to West Chester, Pennsylvania, for the 9th Annual Conference on Exploring Form & Narrative in Poetry. … 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-

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...

As Reviewed By: Jocelyn Emerson

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...

As Reviewed By: John Erhardt

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...

Reviewed:

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...

As Reviewed By: John Drexel

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...

Interviewer’s Note: Born in Los Angeles in 1950, Dana Gioia attended Stanford University and did graduate work at Harvard where he studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald.… continue reading...

Stephen Burt grew up in Washington, D.C., graduated from Harvard College in 1994, and did graduate work at Oxford and then at Yale. He teaches at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota.… 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...

All Day Permanent Red by Christopher Logue. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $18.00.

As Reviewed By: Peter Campion

Christopher Logue is a knave of the old stripe.… continue reading...

 Interviewer’s Note: Adam Kirsch was born in Los Angeles in 1976. After studying English at Harvard, with a focus on poetry, he went to work at The New Republic as assistant literary editor.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar

The Thousand Wells by Adam Kirsch. Ivan R. Dee, 2002. $18.95.

“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...

By: Dana Gioia

[Editor’s Note: The Tenth Anniversary Edition of Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture will be published in August 2002 by Graywolf Press.… 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

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...

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...

Interviewer’s Note: Poet and essayist Sherod Santos is the author of four books of poetry, Accidental Weather (Doubleday, 1982), The Southern Reaches (Wesleyan, 1989), The City of Women (W.… 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...

ADVERTISEMENTS