Maura Stanton recommends Pears, Lake, Sun, a first book of poems by Sandy Solomon: “Sandy Solomon is the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The poems in Pears, Lake, Sun are tough-minded and impeccably crafted, full of passionate stillness and disciplined commotion.” (Pittsburgh)
Philip Levine recommends Reign of Snakes, poems by Robert Wrigley: “Robert Wrigley has been a fine poet through four previous books; his last, In the Bank of the Beautiful Sins, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. In this new book he has become someone else, someone who has wandered into a ferocious cave…
George Garrett recommends Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure, a textbook by Madison Smartt Bell: “A remarkable textbook with an unusual point of view, in which the structural design is primary in the writing of fiction. With excellent examples and analyses.” (Norton)
Perfect Hell Poems by H. L. Hix. Gibbs Smith, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Dana Gioia. H. L. Hix’s Perfect Hell is the most original, accomplished, and intriguing debut volume I have seen in several years. I am so impressed by this dark and disturbing book by a little known poet that I could easily offer…
DeWitt Henry recommends Richard Yates, criticism by David Castronovo and Steven Goldleaf: “As part of Twayne’s United States Authors Series, this book is a provocative, helpful, and well-informed reading of Yates’s work as a canon, related to his biography, the work of his contemporaries, and to the intellectual character of our times and culture. Provides…
Philip Levine recommends New Addresses, poems by Kenneth Koch: “Koch at his best. He addresses what has given his life meaning: sex, love, war service, languages, business, the central and the trivial. Funny poems? Yes. And wonderfully serious.” (Knopf)
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…
Ho-hum Jesus Christ people are still putting out 200-page prose pieces and calling them novels. Even the publisher gets the joke; the wrapper looks like the kind of mimeographed permission-sheet an editor might put on a manuscript before it went to Production. A description of the jacket front panel labelled "jacket front panel" . ….
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