Book Review

The Library of America’s new anthology of Shirley Jackson’s work includes a chronology of the writer’s life, the story collection The Lottery, two novels, several uncollected or unpublished stories, and a “Biography of a Story.” Surprisingly, Joyce Carol Oates’ role as editor did not include writing an introduction or preface to the volume. One important…

Dalton’s second novel begins: “A night breeze lifted the dark skirts of the forest.” This sensuous image escorts us into Kindermann Forest Summer Camp in rural Missouri. Here, all the camp counselors are skinny-dipping. We soon learn that elderly Schuller Kindermann will have none of this at his camp. Out they go, in come replacements:…

Graham Foust’s, poem “My Graham Foust,” caught my attention when I first read it in The Nation (November, 2007). That piece, with its slang, wit, and formal play, is emblematic of this collection: Gone’s his fleshy shovel. Gone’s his ticket; gone’s his train. Gone’s the friend who stepped away and almost saved him. Gone’s the…

C. Dale Young’s third book, Torn, is a tug of war between darkness and tenderness. The contest, in Young’s capable hands, frames, influences, or explicitly dictates the book’s more pointed question: are we as empty and limited as the words we depend upon? Poets may know this better than most, but it’s nonetheless a sobering…

Ecco’s much earlier anthology Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (1976), edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand, brought important poets to the attention of North American readers. The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry’s vast and sweeping ambition covers much more territory, providing work based on one criterion, “the quality of the poem…

Jack Myers’ posthumous book, The Memory of Water, contains many of his finest poems. Mark Cox, who assembled the manuscript with Jack’s widow, Thea Temple, provides a lucid and moving account of Jack’s life and work in his Foreword to the collection. As was true for almost all of Myers’ books, the writer and speaker…

Christie Hodgen’s third book is the story of Mary Murphy and the five people in her life she will never forget. The story unfolds through the elegies of these five and their somewhat seamy lives and how they have shaped Mary into the woman she is today. Mary and her sister, Malinda are burdened with…

Stanley Moss published his first book, The Wrong Angel, in 1966. This current volume represents forty-three years of writing and almost three hundred poems, seventy-five of which are new, and shows the extent of his accomplishment in full force. There’s a brooding quality to this work, an engagement with the eternal verities: the search for…

It is not true, although it is sometimes ungenerously suggested, that the practitioners of contemporary poetry and its readership are one and the same set of people, but it does seem to be true that poetry reviewing is at present done mainly by poets. Since poets read more poetry and have thought harder about it…