Review

rev. of Don’t Think: Look by William Corbett

Through over twenty years of publication, William Corbett's books have steadily and thoroughly documented a life examined through art, offering a series of poems which, as the poet explains in Don't Think: Look, "enable the feeling eye to enact in words what it has seen." What's seen is rarely spectacle; rather, Corbett pursues the illuminating…

rev. of From this Distance by Susan Snively

Susan Snively's poems share their predicament with Anne Sexton's. Considering Sexton's life and career, such a comparison can only be made with trepidation. But genuine similarities bring it to mind. Both are attracted to legends, myths, fairy tales (what Snively calls "Mysteries"). Both are interested in dreams, visions, the problems of illusion and reality (Snively…

Hope is the Thing with Feathers by Christopher Cokinos

Maxine Kumin recommends Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, essays by Christopher Cokinos: “The vividly researched story of six extinct birds of the U.S.A. written by a Kansas State professor and ardent birder/environmentalist. This book deserves a wide readership and distribution. Is it possible for an author to exalt and depress his audience at…

Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome by Stanley Crouch

James Alan McPherson recommends Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome, a first novel by Stanley Crouch: “This is an extraordinary effort by Stanley Crouch to employ the improvisational resources to the blues idiom to explore, in the novel form, the nuances of contemporary reality. In attempting to use ‘riffs’ to examine the emotional and psychological…

rev. of Fuel by Naomi Shihab Nye

Fuel Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Victoria Clausi. The poems in Naomi Shihab Nye’s latest book, Fuel, comprise a world filled with intelligence, warmth, humor, and tenderness. It is a world wherein the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the lived moment links itself to history. It is a world in…

rev. of David Johnson Passed Through Here by John Fairfield

. . .is a first novel, or first book, rather, full of good stuff, shaped loosely and roughly in the form of therapeutic reminiscence. There's a Writer at work in it, experimenting with styles, working for concision, profundity, and no-bullshit meatiness; now and then showing humor and relaxed gusto, now and then waxing into a…

Dreamtime Alice by Mandy Sayer

Dan Wakefield recommends Dreamtime Alice, a memoir by Mandy Sayer: “A compelling memoir of a young woman tap-dancer who works with her musician father on streets corners of New York and New Orleans. A fine work of the memoir genre.” (Ballantine)

Germany by Caroline Finkelstein

Joyce Peseroff recommends Germany, poems by Caroline Finkelstein (Carnegie Mellon): “When a Jewish woman chooses Germany as the title for her book of poems, she is telling you something about language and history. Caroline Finkelstein writes with radiance about an implacable world where ‘. . . the yews move, / . . . the ragged…

rev. of Days Going/Days Coming Back by Eleanor Ross Taylor

Like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Eleanor Ross Taylor is a poet who records in startling detail the mind's passionate and peculiar motion, now supple, now crablike; capable of memory's precise image or its blur. Days Going/Days Coming Back collects new work together with poems from three earlier volumes, and should bring focus and attention…