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…
This is a big, expensive first novel, which in the eight weeks since its publication has drawn both praise and scorn and sold 3000 copies in the process. Detractors write it off as counterculture soap-opera: there are parents in the book, but they're the Enemy, and look at the good guys, ranging in age from…
Not Where I Started From Stories by Kate Wheeler. Houghton Mifflin, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Since Kate Wheeler was once an ordained Buddhist nun in Burma, an immediate and cynical expectation might be for her first book to espouse some sort of New Age philosophy — a saccharine embrace of everything metaphysical, all…
Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. By Alan Williamson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. The very first page of the prefatory material in this new book speaks of Robert Lowell as a moralist, and refers with admiration to something called “moral wisdom,” which we are to ask from poetry. And in…
Christopher Tilghman recommends Safe in America, a novel by Marcie Hershman (HarperCollins): “Marcie Hershman has interwoven a family saga with the triple threats of the Holocaust, war, and AIDS. She presents these calamities as family tragedies, revealed in the heartbreaking ordinariness of daily life. Her story, with its ironic title, should make everyone consider his…
Chase Twichell recommends Ocean Avenue, poems by Malena Mörling: “This is a remarkable first book-taut, often egoless poems that subtly nudge the reader into territory that’s wholly original yet also familiar. Each poem creates a minor shock of recognition.” (New Issues)
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