What a disconcerting book of poems Lloyd Schwartz has written! If Hell, as Hegel said, is Other People, then Schwartz does not even allow us the comfort of such infernal alienation — These People are among us, the poet himself right on the line, and the sad, the mad, and the had constitute an astonishing…
Maxine Kumin and Joyce Peseroff recommend The Moon Reflected Fire, poems by Doug Anderson (Alice James). Kumin: “These are war poems-war poems and beyond. Vivid, compelling, controlled, and often wildly lyrical.” Peseroff: “Not just about Vietnam but resonant with the history of warriors from the backyard to The Iliad to the Bible, Doug Anderson’s first…
Jane Hirshfield recommends The Snow Watcher, poems by Chase Twichell: “Chase Twichell’s new poems are both austere and luminous, both quiet and deeply startling. Her encounter with contemplative mind yields a poetry unlike any other-a new integration of Zen practice and American experience, American sentences. An utterly compelling and extraordinary book.” (Ontario)
Philip Levine recommends Things that Happen Once, poems by Rodney Jones: “Rodney Jones is a new and long overdue discovery of mine. With wit, charm, and great resourcefulness, he writes wonderfully uncluttered poems that pay tribute to a rich cast of characters, from Aunt Madge to Melody, ‘the teenage welfare mother down the hall.’ His…
In the last century, Tolstoy put forth some thoughts on addiction in his essay, "Why Do Men Stupify Themselves?" His thesis is that we drink, take dope of one kind or another, even use tobacco, primarily for the ignoble ends of releasing us from the sanctions and general hamstringing of our consciences. People resort to…
Mary Caponegro opens The Star Café with the image of a "circular garland" that can only be appreciated if you "develop the telescope within yourself, your own inner eye, to see the beauty of the chain it makes, its variegated texture of feather, skin, fur; slimy or smooth." From the start, hers is no ordinary…
Tipping Point Poems by Fred Marchant. The Word Works, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Sam Cornish. Fred Marchant’s first collection of poetry is autobiographical, yet intellectual and poetic enough to avoid the clichés of confessional poetry. There is honest emotion when he writes of his father abusing his mother, or of the same man dying of…
Philip Levine recommends The Mortal City, translations by William Matthews of one hundred epigrams by the Latin poet Martial: “The best book of translations I’ve read in ages. Matthews manages to make a first-century a.d. poet who wrote in Latin sound both like a Roman and a contemporary. All the wit you find in Matthews’s…
Rosellen Brown recommends The Stone Diaries, a novel by Carol Shields (Viking): “A marvelously written, poignant, and funny chronicle of a Canadian woman’s life. This has the wit and authority of a nineteenth-century novel with a knowing contemporary slyness to it.”
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