Review

Two Cities by Adam Zagajewski

Gail Mazur recommends Two Cities, essays by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): “Zagajewski’s a fine poet, one of the best, and this second collection of prose pieces-memoir/essays/prose poems-is the mature work of an ecstatic ironist: cosmopolitan, sweet, philosophical, and revealing. Born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945, Zagajewski is the voice of his generation, everywhere…

The Odes of Horace by David Ferry

Robert Pinsky recommends The Odes of Horace, poems translated by David Ferry: “David Ferry’s versions of Horace have an immense formal appeal: they sound ravishing when you read them aloud, and that appeal to the senses is one of the ways that this book rescues us entirely from the stereotype of Horace as a kind…

The Tiger Iris by Joan Swift

Madeline DeFrees recommends The Tiger Iris, poems by Joan Swift: “Of all the writers I know, Joan Swift is surely one of the best at transforming reverses into poems of astonishing beauty and strength. Her particular blend of memory, imagination, feeling, and intellect creates an alchemy that changes the base metal of experience into gold.”…

rev. of Two Trees by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Twin to the tree whose fruit Eve first tasted, and visible only after she ate, is the tree of immortal beauty, "hung with sweet fruit; / fruit that made the birds nesting there / graceful, brightly plumed and musical," writes Ellen Bryant Voigt in the title poem of her fourth and most overtly philosophical collection….

rev. of The Old Chore by John Hildebidle

John Hildebidle's voice consists of an amalgam of various unstilled voices from the past or present. For the most part, he has gracefully turned away from the poetry of "the Goddamned Self," and finds his inspiration in others. He either speaks through others, in dramatic monologues, or writes about others, in sustained exercises in negative…

rev. of The Trapper’s Last Shot by John Yount

I first got to know John Yount when we were undergraduates together at Vanderbilt during the late Fifties. We struck up a conversation during a ten minute break in a Medieval Philosophy class and quickly agreed that St. Thomas was breaking our backs. I recollect that later we put in some heavy study together concerning…

rev. of Typical American by Gish Jen

There's comedy in Gish Jen's Typical American, comedy tempered in wry and refreshing ways. It's the story of a big-eared, bumbling Chinese boy who makes his way in America almost in spite of himself: unassimilated and adrift in an indifferent Manhattan, he is rescued by a long-lost sister, gets a Ph.D. in engineering, and then…

rev. of The Only World by Lynda Hull

The Only World Poems by Lynda Hull. HarperCollins, $22.00 cloth, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. The term mimesis, unfortunately having come to be redolent of tweeds and pipe smoke, seems wildly inapplicable to a poet as inspired by the exhaust-fumed ether of today’s cities and the musky glamour of their earlier incarnations as…

rev. of The Truly Needy and Other Stories by Lucy Honig

The Truly Needy and Other Stories Stories by Lucy Honig. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Pedro Ponce. The title of Lucy Honig’s debut collection, winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, echoes the familiar plea of fundraisers and activists to forget selfish personal concerns and remember the less fortunate. But for…