In Personal Effects and Letter from an Outlying Province, two books published by the consciously feminist Alice James press, there seems to be a serious failure to "speak the loving word." The vision of Patricia Cumming's Letter. . . is one of anger, the voice dissonant and jagged. Where Sarah Appleton would say "here the…
The problems of voice, subject, and form are crucial to younger poets, who must find solutions if we are ever to read them as older poets. The chronology here is traditional, not temporal. The poets under discussion are "younger" in that, for the most part, they have not published frequently or widely. From their jacket…
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…
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…
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