Galway Kinnell surely possesses the most lyrical voice of his generation; perhaps only the last books of James Wright approached the intensity of music Kinnell builds from "the noise inside things," whether a factory whistle "in concert with the tenor of stomachs" of workmen, or the "slub clump slub clump" of a bricklayer's trowel ("The…
Like the ideally instructed poet, some novelists try to make the ordinary appear extraordinary; others try to make the extraordinary appear ordinary. It seems to me that Stratis Haviaras has, in this short novel, done both at once, an achievement so dazzling it defies the reader to analyze just what is going on. The main…
Where She Went Stories by Kate Walbert. Sarabande Books, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Kate Walbert’s first collection, Where She Went, gives us haunting portraits of two women — a mother and her daughter — both trapped by itinerancy. While Marion Clark, a bride of the fifties, finds nothing but ennui in her many…
Whirling Round the Sun Poems by Suzanne Noguere. Midmarch Arts Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. The title poem of Suzanne Noguere’s Whirling Round the Sun transforms a bus ride through a city in autumn into an epiphany, in which “leaf / by leaf turning” serves as “a clue / to earth’s revolution.”…
Wild Ride Essays by Bia Lowe. HarperCollins, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Bonnie Friedman. Bia Lowe’s lovely first book, Wild Ride, uniquely combines nature essays with personal narrative. Each piece — composed of succulent, sweet prose — is a thought pagoda, ideas storied one atop another, from sneezes to alfalfa to sexual betrayal to Halley’s comet…
Professor Laura Coltelli of the University of Pisa has devoted many years to the oral and written literature, and the varied culture, of American Indians. She now brings us a revealing volume of interviews with eleven contemporary Indian writers. Six are women: Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, and Leslie…
Winning the City by Theodore Weesner. Summit Books. $17.95 cloth. Winning the City is a fine novel, a crisply written story about a young boy's struggle to define himself. Dale Wheeler's position on the school basketball team is unjustly taken from him, and what Dale does in response gives the novel its drive and theme….
Winter Range A novel by Claire Davis. Picador, $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In Winter Range, Idaho writer Claire Davis offers a debut novel that effectively evokes small-town life on the Montana range and culminates in a breathtaking series of artfully constructed calamities. Predominantly from the third-person intimate points of view of the three…
The publication of Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio is to me a personal event because Tillie Olsen herself has had such large effect upon me — as teacher, as friend, as a writer reverenced long before I met her — and these remarks do not pretend to be either objective or dispassionate. Rather, they are meant in…
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