Book Review

The Master of Letters Poems by Lucie Brock-Broido. Knopf, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Wyn Cooper. Rarely does a book of poems appear that takes us back to poems and poets we know we should read again. Even more unusual is a book that sends us back to these poems with an entirely new way of…

I first got to know John Yount when we were undergraduates together at Vanderbilt during the late Fifties. We struck up a conversation during a ten minute break in a Medieval Philosophy class and quickly agreed that St. Thomas was breaking our backs. I recollect that later we put in some heavy study together concerning…

In the last century, Tolstoy put forth some thoughts on addiction in his essay, "Why Do Men Stupify Themselves?" His thesis is that we drink, take dope of one kind or another, even use tobacco, primarily for the ignoble ends of releasing us from the sanctions and general hamstringing of our consciences. People resort to…

The Truly Needy and Other Stories  Stories by Lucy Honig. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Pedro Ponce. The title of Lucy Honig’s debut collection, winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, echoes the familiar plea of fundraisers and activists to forget selfish personal concerns and remember the less fortunate. But for…

Marcia Southwick, in her first major collection ( The Night Won't Save Anyone, University of Georgia Press, $4.50), at times seems to totter toward this reliance on the easily conjured. But she saves her poems simply by dramatizing her personae to adapt them individually to the sometimes dangerously Merwin-like worlds they inhabit. In her long…

The Very Air  A novel by Douglas Bauer. William Morrow, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Alexandra Marshall. In The Very Air, Douglas Bauer’s second novel, “Doctor” Luther Mathias builds an empire with his pirate radio station, which broadcasts illegally over the border into the U.S. in the early part of this century. As events conspire to…

John Hildebidle's voice consists of an amalgam of various unstilled voices from the past or present. For the most part, he has gracefully turned away from the poetry of "the Goddamned Self," and finds his inspiration in others. He either speaks through others, in dramatic monologues, or writes about others, in sustained exercises in negative…

Even the gods crave the pungence of language we have "monstered up" for them in The Want Bone. In poems like "Lament for the Makers," "Hut," and "At Pleasure Bay," Robert Pinsky names the ways we are made — and unmade — by wanting, and how what we want is essentially shaped by naming. But…

The Only World  Poems by Lynda Hull. HarperCollins, $22.00 cloth, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. The term mimesis, unfortunately having come to be redolent of tweeds and pipe smoke, seems wildly inapplicable to a poet as inspired by the exhaust-fumed ether of today’s cities and the musky glamour of their earlier incarnations as…