Frank Bidart, Desire, poems: Bidart’s long-awaited new collection-his first book since In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90-contains some of his most luminous and intimate work to date. The first half include poems about the art of writing, Eros, and the desolations and mirror of history (in a narrative based on Tacitus). The second half…
When he sang of what had passed, the trees would lean toward him, he could suspend the suffering of the damned, he could bring back the dead. Don’t look back! . . . Hell is a spotless room overlooking the ocean; she wants out. “I’m heading for nowhere, what do I have to look…
I wanted the Persian Isfahan rug with the all-over garden of paradise design, the one with one thousand two hundred knots per inch. Its sinister history was of no importance to me, irrelevant the conditions of the weavers, whether they were hungry or suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. I loved the way the tree of…
Fanny Howe, One Crossed Out, poems: The unforgettable voice of many of these poems belongs to May, a homeless woman, the one crossed out. The swirling language conveys a complex consciousness, bridging wisdom and madness, to deliver a searing statement on what it means to be excised from society. (Graywolf)
When we were children, my brother, Frank, and I handled our mother’s danger signals differently. Mama could pluck a word from a simple statement, then snap it back covered with ice. Her very blue eyes could deepen from midday sky-blue to late-afternoon darkening blue, or worse, to night-charged-with-lightning blue. Her normal alto-toned voice could rise…
Existence can only be justified from an aesthetic perspective. —Nietzsche When we come upon the hawk for the first time, I am reminded of the line by Cézanne, the landscape thinks itself in me then imagine a current of sunlight for the bird, the aerial pencil sketch of nearby meadows and woods, the light hysterical….
Their nature? Sanguine, warm and humid as blood, and they comfort the heart. Please help yourself. The names I can’t pronounce—something like paradixani, gerosolimitani. Here, have a taste. I used to be less liberal. I’d cling, think flesh of my flesh. But where does that lead? Collapsed brown mouths the deer won’t eat come winter….
If the novel is the bastard child of two passionately but uneasily matched parents — poetry and journalism — then the short story seems clearly able to trace its descent from the distaff side. I grant poetry the female gender, for reasons that there should be no need to state. Or if there is a…
Part Two Section One 1. Not far from here, at the end of River Run, is a group of streets named by the Mave brothers for the members of their family: John, the father; Marguerite; and her brothers, Charles and James. At the end of the main road was the house where John Joseph…
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