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…
My Body to You Stories by Elizabeth Searle. Univ. of Iowa Press, $22.95. 1992 Iowa Short Fiction Award Winner, selected by James Salter. Reviewed by James Carroll. Elizabeth Searle has written these stories in fire. They are thirteen searing portraits of women or girls whose lives have taken them to the extreme of feeling —…
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…
My Sister Life A memoir by Maria Flook. Pantheon Books, $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by Kathryn Rhett. The author of the novels Open Water and Family Night, Maria Flook turns to memoir in My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister’s Disappearance, and delivers an original, gripping, intensely moving story. In 1964, Flook’s fourteen-year-old sister Karen…
In this slender collection of ethnic and political poetry, Martín Espada does what many black poets of the Sixties did with the Broadside Poetry Series during the black arts movement. He writes for an audience not limited to poets and writers, but for the community at large, and Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's…
New and Selected Poems Poems by Donald Justice. Knopf, $25.00 cloth. Reviewed by Liam Rector. Donald Justice’s New and Selected Poems, which includes work from six of his earlier books and features fifteen new poems, begins with this two-line poem, entitled “On a Picture by Burchfield”: “Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours….
Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow Poems by August Kleinzahler. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $19.00 cloth. Reviewed by David Rivard. August Kleinzahler is a poet whose freshness provokes other poets and critics into describing him as the offspring of unlikely matings. In one book blurb, Thom Gunn brings together Frank O’Hara and Basil Bunting. Helen Vendler,…
This new work of Knott's is remarkable: brilliant and difficult. At first I thought the poems only difficult. Not so much a book as a stone, obdurate and unfeeling. They are of such intensity that the first readings gave me a headache. They wouldn't yield, and I was ready to dismiss them as quite unlike…
The problems of voice, subject, and form are crucial to younger poets, who must find solutions if we are ever to read them as older poets. The chronology here is traditional, not temporal. The poets under discussion are "younger" in that, for the most part, they have not published frequently or widely. From their jacket…
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