Book Review

rev. of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova ed. by Roberta Reeder

This two-volume, bilingual set is the first complete edition of Anna Akhmatova's poems to appear in either Russian or English, and its publication is an event comparable to Thomas Johnson's definitive version of Emily Dickinson. Akhmatova has been numbered with Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam as one of Russia's four great modern poets. Yet the bulk…

rev. of Stonecutter’s Hand by Richard Tillinghast

The Stonecutter’s Hand Poems by Richard Tillinghast. David R. Godine, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. Eleven years after the publication of Our Flag Was Still There, Richard Tillinghast has assembled a fourth full-length collection, The Stonecutter’s Hand, that solidifies and deepens the considerable achievements of his earlier work. Tillinghast’s new volume of poems…

rev. of Quilting by Lucille Clifton

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…

rev. of Rain by Kirsty Gunn

Rain A novel by Kirsty Gunn. Grove/Atlantic, $15.00 cloth. Reviewed by Jessica Dineen. In New Zealander Kirsty Gunn’s first novel, Rain, twelve-year-old Janey and her five-year-old brother, Jim, fight the loss of their innocence as their parents’ world encroaches upon them. They live by an enormous lake, where they play alone, seduced by the solace…

rev. of Rapture by Susan Mitchell

A given of Elizabethan thought — expressed in works as different as Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra — was God's goodness as made manifest through the "infinite variety," to use Enobarbus's phrase, of his creation. Susan Mitchell's Rapture, her second collection, is an extended hymn in praise of our world's…