Among the many pleasures of Old and New Poems is the process of soul-making revealed within its pages. Donald Hall's gifts for seemingly effortless, exact language and formal grace were present from the start, as were his intimations of mortality, both for individuals and for New England's rural life, practiced by generations, supplanted by suburbia….
This is a big, expensive first novel, which in the eight weeks since its publication has drawn both praise and scorn and sold 3000 copies in the process. Detractors write it off as counterculture soap-opera: there are parents in the book, but they're the Enemy, and look at the good guys, ranging in age from…
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…
Perfect Hell Poems by H. L. Hix. Gibbs Smith, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Dana Gioia. H. L. Hix’s Perfect Hell is the most original, accomplished, and intriguing debut volume I have seen in several years. I am so impressed by this dark and disturbing book by a little known poet that I could easily offer…
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