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.”
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.”…
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