The vatic voice requires that a poet believe in both the gods and in posterity, which explains its virtual absence from American letters after the annihilations of World War II. With their lyricism, passion, and irony, Allen Grossman's poems for the millennium, together with work collected from three previous volumes, fashion such a voice for…
Stained Glass Poems by Rosanna Warren. W.W. Norton, $17.95 cloth. Reviewed by Jonathan Aaron. In “Tide Pickers,” one of the tough-minded, beautifully crafted meditations in Rosanna Warren’s third collection of poems, the speaker sees the figures of people digging for shellfish on the Brittany coast as “Question marks at the tide line.” She wonders of…
George Garrett recommends The Buddha in Malibu, stories by William Harrison: “A collection of seventeen short stories set in Hollywood, Africa, and the future.” (Missouri)
The Foreign Student A novel by Susan Choi. HarperFlamingo, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. At first, finding any similarities between South Korea and Tennessee in the 1950’s might seem impossible, but Susan Choi manages to do just that in her lyrical first novel, The Foreign Student. In 1955, Chang Ahn flees war-battered Seoul and…
New and Selected Poems Poems by Donald Justice. Knopf, $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by Liam Rector. Donald Justice’s New and Selected Poems, which includes work from six of his earlier books and features fifteen new poems, begins with this two-line poem, entitled “On a Picture by Burchfield”: “Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours….
James Welch recommends Philadelphia Flowers, poems by Roberta Hill Whiteman: “Once in a great while, a poet, like an eagle, catches a draft and soars to new heights. Philadelphia Flowers is that draft, and Roberta Hill Whiteman is that poet. This is an important, beautifully crafted book of poems by one of America’s brightest poets.”…
Rise the Euphrates A novel by Carol Edgarian. Random House, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. It is an Armenian tradition to begin the telling of a story with the words Gar oo chugar: There was and there was not. The phrase is repeated throughout Carol Edgarian’s exquisitely written first novel, Rise the Euphrates, and…
This new work of Knott's is remarkable: brilliant and difficult. At first I thought the poems only difficult. Not so much a book as a stone, obdurate and unfeeling. They are of such intensity that the first readings gave me a headache. They wouldn't yield, and I was ready to dismiss them as quite unlike…
Philip Levine recommends Picnic, Lightning, poems by Billy Collins: “For some years now Billy Collins has been our most delightful poet, someone who handles his lines with superb grace and an unerring ear and whose personal take on the world can make the reader laugh out loud and beg for more. But careful readers of…
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