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…
Not Where I Started From Stories by Kate Wheeler. Houghton Mifflin, $19.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Since Kate Wheeler was once an ordained Buddhist nun in Burma, an immediate and cynical expectation might be for her first book to espouse some sort of New Age philosophy — a saccharine embrace of everything metaphysical, all…
Rise the Euphrates A novel by Carol Edgarian. Random House, $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. It is an Armenian tradition to begin the telling of a story with the words Gar oo chugar: There was and there was not. The phrase is repeated throughout Carol Edgarian’s exquisitely written first novel, Rise the Euphrates, and…
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…
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