Book Review

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…

Six Figures  A novel by Fred G. Leebron. Knopf, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Stewart O’Nan. Fred G. Leebron’s provocative second novel takes on the frustrations of the young American middle class, born to privilege and fearful they may fail in their expected pursuit of success. By painstakingly dissecting the thwarted aspirations of its main character,…

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…

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…