The Cartographer’s Vacation Poems by Andrea Cohen. Owl Creek Press, $13.00 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. With its aesthetic roots planted in the tradition of American Surrealism, Andrea Cohen’s first collection, The Cartographer’s Vacation, is delightfully unfashionable. Cohen might well have hung these lines from her poem “Instructions for Writing” on the cover of the…
A more conventionally integrated dramatic element informs Richard Tillinghast's new book. The Knife and Other Poems (Wesleyan, $3.95) is his first collection in eleven years. The title poem evokes the knife as a passive symbol, like Whitman's broad-axe or Dickey's helmet: a hard, masculine image of potential violence, and yet, in this poem as in…
The Chain Poems by Tom Sleigh. Univ. of Chicago Press, $35.00 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Tom Sleigh’s third collection, The Chain, reads as if the history of poetry culminated in his voice. From the beginning, Sleigh’s book encompasses, and is encompassed by, the mythical. “Lamentation on Ur,” an “adaptation, from a…
In Personal Effects and Letter from an Outlying Province, two books published by the consciously feminist Alice James press, there seems to be a serious failure to "speak the loving word." The vision of Patricia Cumming's Letter. . . is one of anger, the voice dissonant and jagged. Where Sarah Appleton would say "here the…
Sky Open Again Poems by Gian Lombardo. Dolphin-Moon, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Priscilla Sneff. The prose poem, constructed of sentences rather than lines, is a more liquid sort of solid than other poems. More like glass — that is, molten, mobile, globby — than crystal, the prose poem makes do without enjambment, relying instead on…
Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. By Alan Williamson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. The very first page of the prefatory material in this new book speaks of Robert Lowell as a moralist, and refers with admiration to something called “moral wisdom,” which we are to ask from poetry. And in…
Playing Out of the Deep Woods Stories by G. W. Hawkes. Univ. of Missouri Press, $14.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. A conventional wisdom about short story collections these days is that they must feature stories that are linked in some way — collections that focus on a particular series of characters, or a particular…
Readers familiar with the verbal dazzle of Alice Fulton's previous collections might assume that the title of her third is a sly allusion to sexual politics. But Fulton is engaged by all sorts of meetings and collisions, from the nuclear family to the electron, as well as by the individual's confrontation with God. Fulton's equanimity…
In her latest book of poems, Lucille Clifton writes about the lives of women as poets, historical witnesses, opinionated friends, mothers, wives. With all of them, there is a painful honesty that makes Clifton's work worthwhile, even if not for every taste. Often, the poems are personal, barren utterances of feminist rage, represented in a…
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