Meadowlands by Louise Glück
Jane Shore recommends Meadowlands, poems by Louise Glück: “A brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking book, both personal and universal, by the master craftsperson and muse of her generation.” (Ecco)
Review
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In the Family Way by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Dan Wakefield recommends In the Family Way, a novel by Lynne Sharon Schwartz: ” In the Family Way is a witty, loving, totally credible novel of the way a typically atypical family lives now. Another fine novel by the author of that small masterpiece, Leaving Brooklyn.” (Morrow)
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Late Summer Break by Ann B. Knox
Maxine Kumin recommends Late Summer Break, fiction by Ann B. Knox (Papier-Mache): “A delightful series of interwoven short stories, mostly with female protagonists, set on the fringes of rural life, in which the author explores interaction between the generations in ways that touch all of us.”
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rev. of Memory’s Handgrenade by Thomas Lux
It is easy in one way to review Thomas Lux's Memory's Handgrenade because the book is such a pleasure to read and re-read. It is also easy to be misled: one keeps hearing other voices in his work. There is W.S. Merwin, with whom Lux shares a concern for subjects like gloves (Merwin: "gloves of…
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rev. of In the Surgical Theatre by Dana Levin
In the Surgical Theatre Poems by Dana Levin. The American Poetry Review, $14.00 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. Dana Levin’s first book of poetry, In the Surgical Theatre, resonates with the dual imagery of pain and healing, scalpel and angel. The poems move swiftly and seamlessly from the literal drama of the operating room —…
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rev. of Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
Jane Kenyon's third book of poems is deceptively quiet, gorgeously written, fierce and lyrical, stuffed with the luminous details of the ordinary world. It's a book struggling for vision and written out of deep necessity, and so it's hard to quote from — the poems make up a whole cloth. But passionate spiritual inquiry is…
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rev. of Mercy Seat by Bruce Smith
Mercy Seat Poems by Bruce Smith. Univ. of Chicago, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by David Rivard. In the epigraph to a poem called “Self-Portrait as Ornette Coleman,” Bruce Smith quotes the legendary saxophonist as saying of Spike Jones’s treatment of an old standard, “He’d take ‘Stardust’ and run a saw through it then come back…
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rev. of In the Western Night, Collected Poems 1965-90 by Frank Bidart
Frank Bidart has business with substancelessness, whether in the wasting figure of Ellen West or in dreams which suffuse the old and new poems of In the Western Night. The book's unusual structure — Bidart begins with poems dated "1990," works retrospectively through books published 1983-1976, and ends with his most recent poems — suggests…
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rev. of Letter from an Outlying Province by Patricia Cumming
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…