Review Archives - Page 25 of 85

The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography by Philip Levine

Philip Levine, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, personal essays: With artful, witty, illuminating prose, Levine recounts his youth in Detroit and his adulthood in California and Spain, and celebrates his mentors John Berryman and Yvor Winters. (Michigan)

rev. of Cathedral of the North by Connie Voisine

Cathedral of the North Poems by Connie Voisine. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Denise Duhamel. Connie Voisine’s Cathedral of the North is an intriguing account of the working poor of Maine, a place where the speaker’s “yard blooms with refrigerators and cars inside out and rusting.” Like Carolyn Chute’s earlier novels, Voisine’s…

The World Below by Sue Miller

Sue Miller, The World Below, a novel: In her sixth novel, Miller hauntingly exposes the nerves, hopes, and regrets that lie hidden in the marriages and families of two women-a San Francisco schoolteacher and her Vermont grandmother. (Knopf)

The Haunting of L. by Howard Norman

Howard Norman, The Haunting of L., a novel: The final book in Norman’s Canadian trilogy, this beautifully crafted novel-set in Manitoba and Halifax-becomes a chilling fable about moral blindness, spirit photography, adultery, artistic ambition, and greed. (FSG)

rev. of Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father by Joseph Hurka

Fields of Light A memoir by Joseph Hurka. Pushcart Press, $24.50 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In this debut book of nonfiction, American Joseph Hurka, son of a Czech anti-Communist resistance fighter, offers a generous, kind, and thoughtful memoir about his desire to inhabit his father Josef’s past, and thereby give both of them a…

Night Picnic by Charles Simic

Charles Simic, Night Picnic, poems: Playful and incandescent, these new poems also show more of Simic’s epigrammatic and darker side, reminding us of the lyricism in daily life. (Harcourt)

Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling by Maura Stanton

Maura Stanton, Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, stories: Ten darkly funny short stories that prove to be unpredictable, smart, and lively, with tales ranging from a glimpse of Gertrude Stein playing Ping-Pong with a G.I. in Paris during World War II to a woman discovering that her dead sister had written a bad…

rev. of Full Moon Boat by Fred Marchant

Full Moon Boat Poems by Fred Marchant. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Its title and first poem proclaim Fred Marchant’s fine Full Moon Boat an odyssey inverted, defining an alternative to the ideal of the heroic return from war. Pressure from the family to adopt the martial model comes early, an…

rev. of Oubliette by Peter Richards

Oubliette Poems by Peter Richards. Verse Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. If you are a poet of any seriousness, you make a style for yourself out of one essential contradiction: the “thinginess” of experience, of thinking and feeling, and especially of silence, can’t be captured by words. The most distinctive stylists of the…