Jane Hirshfield recommends Elegies, poems by Lars Gustafsson: “One of the world’s major poets, Lars Gustafsson has lived quietly in this country since 1983. His poems have the kind of sureness of line we admire in the drawings of the old masters, and his engagement is with essential matters. Yet within his imaginative authority there…
The poem of Gilgamesh, recreated by David Ferry from the thirtieth-century B.C. epic which is itself a retelling of an older Sumerian text, is best known by most readers for a tale of the Flood, complete with Sumerian Noah, that parallels Genesis. But the full narrative is a more troubling, darker story of a stormy-hearted…
Definition of the Soul Poems by John Skoyles. Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, $24.95 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. The best poems in John Skoyles’s Definition of the Soul find solace in small scale. Their particular skill — announcing the Looming whose umbrage prompts them, but answering with barely lumen enough to light…
Elijah Visible Stories by Thane Rosenbaum. St. Martin’s Press, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Marcie Hershman. This is as vibrant and provocative a collection of short fiction as I’ve read in years. That it is also a debut collection makes it all the more gratifying. Thane Rosenbaum, who, in his early thirties left a prestigious New…
Joyce Peseroff recommends Girl Hurt, a first book of poems by E. J. Miller-Laino: ” Girl Hurt records a woman’s journey from the underworld of shame and hurt, where Mother cries ‘like Frankenstein in the movie, / those deep, guttural half-words . . . / of monsters created with human hearts,’ to the light of…
Much contemporary poetry attempts to charge a landscape with the imaginative self through an allegorical and mythological vision. While poetry of the past tends to place the self in a landscape where it perceives and reacts, our contemporaries frankly reverse the process and locate the landscape in the psyche. This extends what Roy Harvey Pearce…
Emerald City Stories by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Jodee Stanley. In the title story of Jennifer Egan’s collection, Emerald City, a young photographer’s assistant walks down the streets of Manhattan with his girlfriend, an unsuccessful model. He takes in the street noise, the dark storefronts, looking for something that…
Glass, Irony, and God Poems by Anne Carson. New Directions, $14.00 paper. Reviewed by Liam Rector. Poet and editor James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, is still acquiring poetry that is importantly new, poetry that still sets and extends new directions. Again taking up the battle cry of his essential mentor, Ezra Pound, Laughlin has…
Desiring Flight Poems by Christianne Balk. Purdue Univ. Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. Among the many pleasures of Christianne Balk’s Desiring Flight, two stand out. First, Balk has — as she showed in her Walt Whitman Award-winning Bindweed — a biologist’s precise knowledge of the natural world, and consequently her poems convey, at…
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