Review Archives - Page 32 of 85

rev. of The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones

The Pugilist at Rest Stories by Thom Jones. Little, Brown and Company, $18.95 cloth. Reviewed by Kevin Miller. Already commercially successful, with half the entries previously in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Esquire, Thom Jones’s debut collection is best described as utterly uncompromising. From his gallery of hard-assed, hard-headed, hard-luck, or simply hard cases, to…

rev. of The Want Bone by Robert Pinsky

Even the gods crave the pungence of language we have "monstered up" for them in The Want Bone. In poems like "Lament for the Makers," "Hut," and "At Pleasure Bay," Robert Pinsky names the ways we are made — and unmade — by wanting, and how what we want is essentially shaped by naming. But…

rev. of The Long Home by Christian Wiman

The Long Home Poems by Christian Wiman. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Poets’ voices seldom emerge fully formed: first books more often air promise than plenitude, recklessness than resonance. But Christian Wiman’s The Long Home, winner of the 1998 Nicholas Roerich Prize, speaks with mature authority. The Long Home…

rev. of The Question of Bruno by Aleksander Hemon

The Question of Bruno Stories by Aleksander Hemon. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Peter Ho Davies. The stunning stories in this first collection by Bosnian exile Aleksander Hemon achieve the remarkable and delicate feat of being at once strikingly diverse in setting, style, and period, and subtly and sinuously intertwined. They range in…

The Waters of Forgetting by Barry Seiler

Joyce Peseroff recommends The Waters of Forgetting, a poetry collection by Barry Seiler (Univ. of Akron): “Seiler brings together poems that spring from the tensions between memory and forgetting, past and present, the daily and the eternal. He connects public moments with personal history in lyrics that are bittersweet and fresh.”

rev. of The Lover of History by Jonathan Dee

Jonathan Dee's prescient novel. The Lover of History, was published in 1990, just before the Gulf War, and save for a few brief, favorable reviews, the book was, more or less, ignored. One supposes this had something to do with the timing of publication. For though the novel is elegantly written, precisely observed, and thoughtful,…

rev. of The Rabbi in the Attic and Other Stories by Eileen Pollack

The stories in Eileen Pollack's first collection, The Rabbi in the Attic, occupy the delicate knife edges of human emotion with such utter solidity and weight that this writer keeps rereading in hope of discovering how she does it. In one story a woman allows an air conditioner to fall seventeen stories and flatten a…

rev. of The Way Out by Lisa Sewell

The Way Out Poems by Lisa Sewell. Alice James Books, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. Lisa Sewell’s first collection of poems, The Way Out, explores territory that’s not fit for the timid; whether she’s writing about the body’s generation or its decay, or of love, or sex, or of abortions, she does so with…

The Making of a Poem edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland

Maxine Kumin recommends The Making of a Poem, an anthology edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland: “An eminently sensible book to work from, this anthology of poetic forms is delightfully varied, with succinct commentary.” (Norton)

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