Review

Donald Hall recommends A Word Like Fire, selected poems by Dick Barnes: “Barnes, who died five years ago, was little known in the East, but he was a man of vast energy. His knowledge was superb, and his talents went everywhere. He taught literature at Pomona College, performed with his own jazz band, wrote and…

Donald Hall recommends Playland: Poems 1994–2004, by Eve Packer: "Eve was my student at Michigan, and much later my friend when I lived for a while in New York. It’s one of those books about which people say, ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ There is a liveliness and specificity about it, pure Manhattan, duly and…

Justin Kaplan recommends The Peabody Sisters, a biography by Megan Marshall: “A heroically researched and beautifully written biography about three women who were, in many ways, the American Brontës.” (Houghton Mifflin)

Maxine Kumin recommends Healed by Horses, a memoir by Carole Fletcher with Lawrence Scanlon: “A remarkable story of a young woman burned over sixty-five percent of her body, who made it back through agonizing debridements and skin grafts to training and actually performing with her much-loved horses.” (Atria)

Philip Levine recommends Sky, poems by Christopher Buckley: "Buckley is a California poet who—though he has published at least ten books—seems little known in the East. His poems are both Western and universal. It is the landscape of California that serves as the backdrop to the striving for significance that enriched his boyhood in Santa…

DeWitt Henry recommends When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother, nonfiction by Thomas J. Cottle: “Cottle’s memoir of his mother, Gitta Gradova, a prominent concert pianist, is first a biography that evokes her career, performances, and friendships with such greats as Rachmaninoff, Toscanini, Heifetz, and Horowitz, giving us a cross section of classical music’s inner…

DeWitt Henry recommends Garrett in Wedlock, stories by Paul Mandelbaum: "In this ‘novel-in-stories,’ Garrett, who feels ‘himself to be without ethnic heritage,’ is thrown into a jumble of heritages by love of his wife and her two children by earlier marriages, one to a Norwegian adventurer, the other to an Indian bigamist. The Norwegian comes…