To Put the Mouth To Poems by Judith Hall. Quill/William Morrow, $8.00 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. “To put the mouth to” is an old definition of adorare, and the phrase gives Judith Hall a memorable title while also providing a ground-bass for this musical and voluptuously intelligent first collection. “Love / Is difficult…
Marcia Southwick, in her first major collection ( The Night Won't Save Anyone, University of Georgia Press, $4.50), at times seems to totter toward this reliance on the easily conjured. But she saves her poems simply by dramatizing her personae to adapt them individually to the sometimes dangerously Merwin-like worlds they inhabit. In her long…
The Stories of John Edgar Wideman includes two previously published collections, Fever and Damballah, and ten new pieces gathered under the title All Stories Are True — an African proverb that has become Wideman's guiding meditation. For in all his works, in his stories and his memoir and his seven novels, Wideman shatters the barrier…
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…
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…
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.”…
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….
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…
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…
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