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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)
Playing Out of the Deep Woods Stories by G. W. Hawkes. Univ. of Missouri Press, $14.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. A conventional wisdom about short story collections these days is that they must feature stories that are linked in some way — collections that focus on a particular series of characters, or a particular…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Saying the Necessary, poems by Edward Harkness: “The balance between reality and imagination is so precarious and the language so persuasive that the reader identifies with the speaker.” (Pleasure Boat Studio)
Marilyn Hacker recommends In the Crevice of Time, poems by Josephine Jacobsen (Johns Hopkins): “The collected and new work of a poet who is truly one of our ‘unacknowledged legislators.’ Josephine Jacobsen’s keen intelligence and moral acuity are perfectly matched to the precision, elegance, and wit of her words: and that fit never ceases to…
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