Jane Hirshfield recommends The Snow Watcher, poems by Chase Twichell: “Chase Twichell’s new poems are both austere and luminous, both quiet and deeply startling. Her encounter with contemplative mind yields a poetry unlike any other-a new integration of Zen practice and American experience, American sentences. An utterly compelling and extraordinary book.” (Ontario)
Philip Levine recommends Things that Happen Once, poems by Rodney Jones: “Rodney Jones is a new and long overdue discovery of mine. With wit, charm, and great resourcefulness, he writes wonderfully uncluttered poems that pay tribute to a rich cast of characters, from Aunt Madge to Melody, ‘the teenage welfare mother down the hall.’ His…
In the last century, Tolstoy put forth some thoughts on addiction in his essay, "Why Do Men Stupify Themselves?" His thesis is that we drink, take dope of one kind or another, even use tobacco, primarily for the ignoble ends of releasing us from the sanctions and general hamstringing of our consciences. People resort to…
Mary Caponegro opens The Star Café with the image of a "circular garland" that can only be appreciated if you "develop the telescope within yourself, your own inner eye, to see the beauty of the chain it makes, its variegated texture of feather, skin, fur; slimy or smooth." From the start, hers is no ordinary…
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…
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