1. Ulcerated tooth keeps me awake, there is such pain, would have to go to the hospital to have it pulled or would bleed to death from the blood thinners, but can’t leave Mother, she falls and forgets her salve and her tranquilizers, her ankles swell so and her bowels are so bad, she almost…
Robert B. Shaw's Comforting the Wilderness (Wesleyan, 1977) deserves attention not only because it is a very good first collection of poems, but also because it raises the question of where American poetry is going at the moment. It exemplifies, I think, a gradual revival of interest in the well-made poem. Since Robert Lowell and…
When I was a boy we always did it this way. I wake to the smell of coffee and you are at the fire, its flames mirrored in your glasses. Buck, the Colonel’s dog, sleeps on beneath the bunk house his old legs quivering with problems of their own. The raw south Texas dawn is…
“Spain will surprise you.” — Suarez Tooting down the Gran Via, tossing out bundles of loose white leaflets, the campaign caravans roll. At nine in the evening leaflets snow on the heads and shoulders of Madrilenos at sidewalk cafes and cover their plates of hot, fried churros, while those in the paseo scuff through leaflets…
In England, by and large, poets are in the habit of looking backwards and inwards. They are obsessed with the tradition of Auden and Larkin; they write nostalgically (and neatly) about themselves, their childhoods, their love affairs, their politics. There is a whole generation of younger poets who have circumambiated the innovations of Eliot and…
It has rained this afternoon and the landscape is a darker green. Wind rushes up and down the hillside until the field shudders like something alive. I linger at the screen door accepting these gifts watching the evening draw away into one corner of the sky. None of this will ever be quite enough. As…
* For once she gets to go with big Cousin Beatie, who is starting her breasts. They’re at Uncle Charlie’s farm. Grandma says, “Ach, Kind, what will they think of next, enahow, the town school? Hunt the butterflies, yet!” But Beatie says, “It’s an Assignment.” Mother says, “Now go, first.” But she hates the outhouse,…
Anne Stevenson has been around, quietly, for some time now. Born in England, daughter of the philosopher C. L. Stevenson, she grew up in New Haven and Ann Arbor, married and moved to England almost twenty years ago. She published two books of verse in this country, most importantly Reversals (Wesleyan, 1969). Then Oxford University…
The setting out was easy, your hands lifted in air to the relatives turned like trees to the river, the water flocking from the prow. Even when summer came back and doors opened for evening no word came. A search party covered the heavy water, waiting for it to open and hold you before their…
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