The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 Poems by Jack Gilbert. Knopf, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by David Daniel. One of the joys of reading Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires is how stubbornly it celebrates the courage and beauty found in the most habitual, commonly shared moments of our lives. This will come as news to no one…
The Blue Hour A novel by Elizabeth Evans. Algonquin Books, $17.95 cloth. Reviewed by Janet Desaulniers. In Elizabeth Evans’s first novel, The Blue Hour, the narrator, Penny, recounts her teenaged years with both a child’s twitchy, anticipatory dread of the future and an adult’s sorrowful knowledge of the past. The book peels away the decorous…
If a work of art is the realization of one's deepest imaginative processes, including the dream process, then everything that an artist produces becomes part of his own privately-ordered collection, which as a matter of course moves into the public domain. In this literal sense, Brian Moore's Great Victorian Collection can be viewed as a…
Other People’s Troubles Poems by Jason Sommer. Univ. of Chicago Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Although the jacket copy on Jason Sommer’s Other People’s Troubles calls attention to the poems’ focus on the Holocaust, the poems themselves wisely do not. If the jacket shouts Holocaust, the poems breathe it with the same…
There are some dazzling innovators in fiction these days. The 1970s have been electrically charged with Barth's succession of fun houses, barthelme's mosaics, Marquez's dream epics, Borges' magic boxes, Gaddis' unending tape recorder, and Calvino's invisible voyages. Midst these splendors, is there room for an author who plays no tricks whatever? Andre Dubus' Separate Flights…
Out West A novel by Fred G. Leebron. Doubleday, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. There is nothing timid about Fred G. Leebron’s first novel, Out West. He takes two basically decent, highly educated, young social do-gooders and quickly steeps them into the squalid heart of two murders, and then asks us, his readers, to…
Shark Dialogues A novel by Kiana Davenport. Atheneum, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Katherine Min. Hawaiian-born writer Kiana Davenport’s new novel, Shark Dialogues, resembles a myriad of dreams, each of them urgent and vivid, some dark with destruction and heartbreak, others bright with triumph, all shimmering with sensual beauty. Davenport manages to create a world that…
Paradise, New York A novel by Eileen Pollack. Temple Univ. Press, $27.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, Paradise, New York, Eileen Pollack, author of the acclaimed 1991 story collection The Rabbi in the Attic, deftly evokes the entertaining and complex life of a Catskills hotel, as seen through the eyes of…
Sister to Sister: Women Write About the Unbreakable Bond. An anthology edited by Patricia Foster. Anchor Books/Doubleday, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett. For the anthology Sister to Sister, Patricia Foster has gathered twenty compelling pieces on an essential subject: the relationships of sisters. Foster writes in her introduction that she opened her eyes one…
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