This two-volume, bilingual set is the first complete edition of Anna Akhmatova's poems to appear in either Russian or English, and its publication is an event comparable to Thomas Johnson's definitive version of Emily Dickinson. Akhmatova has been numbered with Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam as one of Russia's four great modern poets. Yet the bulk…
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf Poems by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Wyn Cooper. It is obvious from the first poem in Laure-Anne Bosselaar’s debut book of poetry in English that her concerns will be large: “while my grandfather, a prisoner of war / in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned / booties…
Don Lee recommends Take Three, poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis, Joe Osterhaus, and Larissa Szporluk: “An innovative and worthy new annual series from Graywolf, edited by Agni’s Askold Melnyczuk. Designed to launch the work of new poets, this first volume presents about twenty-five poems by each of these young writers — three very different, vibrant…
Anne Bernays recommends The Consolations of Philosophy, essays by Alain de Botton: “Makes the abstruse fascinating.” (Pantheon)
The Invisible Circus A novel by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Jesse Lee Kercheval. My copy of the Harper’s Book of Quotations insists that Henry Ford really said, “History is more or less bunk,” instead of the shorter, blunter version usually attributed to him. Either way, most Americans would probably agree….
Talking to High Monks in the Snow An Asian American Odyssey by Lydia Minatoya. Harper Perennial, $20.00 cloth, $11.00 paper. Reviewed by Leila Philip. “I am a woman who apologizes to her furniture,” states Lydia Minatoya halfway through her engaging memoir about growing up as a Japanese American. ” ‘Excuse me,’ I say when I…
Philip Levine recommends The Dear Past & Other Poems, a collection by Janet Lewis (Robert L. Barth): “These poems were written over a period of seventy-five years, from 1919 to 1994, and though they demonstrate a variety of strategies and structures, they are brought together by the extraordinary precision and clarity of Lewis’s artistry, as…
A more conventionally integrated dramatic element informs Richard Tillinghast's new book. The Knife and Other Poems (Wesleyan, $3.95) is his first collection in eleven years. The title poem evokes the knife as a passive symbol, like Whitman's broad-axe or Dickey's helmet: a hard, masculine image of potential violence, and yet, in this poem as in…
Ruth Whitman's Tamsen Donner has already been widely praised, and for good reason. The book is a poetic journal, imaginatively recreated, of a pioneer woman who undertook the cross-country trek to California in 1846-1847. The Donner party came to grief in the high Sierras, only a hundred miles from the Sacramento Valley. Tamsen Donner had…
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