Review Archives - Page 60 of 85

rev. of Animals by Alice Mattison

For sheer corporeal presence in verse, it would be hard to match Alice Mattison. Her best subject is motherhood, including pregnancy (no need to say " enceinte" in this case). No subject holds more boredom or fascination for us. As Adrienne Rich has noted, we tend either to make too much or too little of…

Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras

David Gullette recommends Bite Every Sorrow, poems by Barbara Ras: “Barbara Ras has written a dazzling first book of poems-C. K. Williams’s choice for this year’s Walt Whitman Award. She favors long, opulent, clever lines, as when she falls for a man in Central America: ‘I loved the gesture for wait, two hands pumping the…

rev. of Camellia Street by Merce Rodoreda, trans. by David H. Rosenthal

Camellia Street A novel by Mercè Rodoreda, translated by David H. Rosenthal. Graywolf Press, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by James Carroll. “They abandoned me on Camellia Street, in front of a garden gate, and the night watchman found me early the next morning.” So begins Camellia Street, a small masterpiece of fiction by Mercè Rodoreda, the…

rev. of Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook

When Anne Sexton died in her garage, asphyxiated by exhaust, in October of 1974, a generation of writers and readers were jolted, if not quite surprised. Death had been a main subject of hers; yes, poetry was, in Peter Davison's phrase, a "dangerous trade." When Sexton was twenty-eight, living the hemmed-in life of an unfulfilled…

rev. of Bitter Lake by Ann Harleman

Bitter Lake A novel by Ann Harleman. Southern Methodist Univ. Press, $22.50 cloth, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, Bitter Lake, Ann Harleman, the 1993 winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, deftly evokes the complex world of abandonment in a dysfunctional family. Here is a meditative work about family,…

rev. of Central Square by George Packer

Central Square A novel by George Packer. Graywolf, $24.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. There is a Cambridge, Massachusetts, with which few outsiders are familiar — the neighborhood that is the title of George Packer’s second novel, Central Square, which squats between posh Harvard and MIT, blighting the main avenue with “its discount shops, foreign…

A Different Person by James Merrill

Richard Tillinghast recommends A Different Person, a memoir by James Merrill (Knopf): “The late James Merrill turns out to have been a perfect memoirist. The life, the sensibility, the writing style, are perfectly of a piece. A past master in his use of metaphor, Merrill brings that gift to his prose.”

Black Drum by Enid Shomer

Maxine Kumin recommends Black Drum, poems by Enid Shomer: “Dazzling work by a Florida poet now living in Manhattan; Shomer weaves her net so skillfully that the reader is caught up in the story long before realizing the formal element that holds the squares in place. This book deserves serious attention.” (Arkansas)

rev. of Cheaters and Other Stories by Dean Albarelli

Cheaters and Other Stories Stories by Dean Albarelli. St. Martin’s, $20.95 cloth. Reviewed by Joan Wickersham. Dean Albarelli’s Cheaters and Other Stories is a collection about moral responsibility, as considered by people who have, for the most part, disappointed themselves. “What he needed was the energy and idealism of his younger self, back when he…