Kazuo Ishiguro's justifiably acclaimed novel, The Remains of the Day, has been considered unique due to the fact that the writer, a Japanese who grew up in England, has demonstrated his brilliance in projecting his imagination into the mental habits of a British butler, Stevens, who serves in the household of Lord Darlington. Stevens' language…
Marilyn Hacker recommends The Woman Behind You, poems by Julie Fay: “Julie Fay’s The Woman Behind You is at once a superb manifestation of the contemporary possibilities of lyric poetry and a sustained and gripping narrative of a late-twentieth-century woman’s life, exemplary in its specificities, picaresque in the geographic and erotic vicissitudes of its quest….
The Master of Letters Poems by Lucie Brock-Broido. Knopf, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Wyn Cooper. Rarely does a book of poems appear that takes us back to poems and poets we know we should read again. Even more unusual is a book that sends us back to these poems with an entirely new way of…
The River at Work Poems by Jean Valentine. Alice James Books, $8.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. There are some poets whose work incites a reader to metaphor. This is especially true of those whose ultimate subject is the unsayable, the numinous — where the risks taken by the poet must provoke her reader into…
The World Book Poems by Steven Cramer. Copper Beech Press, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. “Sentimentality,” Wallace Stevens said, “is a failure of feeling.” The poems in Steven Cramer’s courageous and powerful second collection, The World Book, risk that failure: they address themes susceptible to sentiment, such as the narrator’s adolescence, the deaths…
Christopher Tilghman recommends The Mirror, a novel by Lynn Freed: “Lynn Freed pulls off a stunning tour de force in this flawless life story of a woman in South Africa after World War I. Please, read this book.” (Crown)
The Sixteen Pleasures A novel by Robert Hellenga. Soho Press, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Joan Wickersham. A character in The Sixteen Pleasures tells of a shop in Rome where petitioners in marital annulment cases can buy old postcards, old inks, and old uncanceled stamps, for the purpose of fabricating evidence from the past. This desire…
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…
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