Book Review

In the Surgical Theatre  Poems by Dana Levin. The American Poetry Review, $14.00 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. Dana Levin’s first book of poetry, In the Surgical Theatre, resonates with the dual imagery of pain and healing, scalpel and angel. The poems move swiftly and seamlessly from the literal drama of the operating room —…

It's no lie that the American novel is in deep trouble. Especially the "serious" novel, which is to say the story that by all the available ways and means of craft aims to offer a sensuous affective experience, the first condition of a work of art. It's true that, compared to non-fiction, to all kinds…

Frank Bidart has business with substancelessness, whether in the wasting figure of Ellen West or in dreams which suffuse the old and new poems of In the Western Night. The book's unusual structure — Bidart begins with poems dated "1990," works retrospectively through books published 1983-1976, and ends with his most recent poems — suggests…

Although best known for its pastoral sympathies, Maxine Kumin's work has always possessed a moral edge, and in her latest book, Looking for Luck, she confronts the precarious nature of privilege, awarded to some, withheld from others, human and beast alike. In "Looking for Luck in Bangkok," the poet stoops under an elephant smelling of…

In "My Neighbor and Myself," Pamela Stewart recalls, after almost thirty years, a playmate dressed for first communion: ". . . polished shoes, string / of funny beads, infected me with doubt" about her own transcendental conversations with God under a maple tree. For Stewart, doubt suffuses the roil of human affairs, and the poems…

Bernard Cooper's Maps to Anywhere, his first book, cannot be easily categorized. To call it, simply, a collection of essays would be an injustice. For though it charts a number of disparate courses — philosophical, whimsical meditations on such subjects as baked potatoes, art, utopia, architecture, religion, and paleontology — a narrative arc develops, edges…

Douglas Worth is another encouraging young poet. The epigraph at the front of his book recalls Sarah Appleton's poetry — "What is essential is invisible to the eye." That this epigraph is a quote not from Teilhard or any similar source but from The Little Prince points at once to the weakness and the strength…

Linda Svendsen's lovely first book, Marine Life, reads like a muted version of the work of fellow Canadian writers Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Isabel Huggan. Her stories, like theirs, are funny, beautifully written, emotionally precise tales about the lives of girls and women, although in Marine Life the girls and women are all the…

Aside from that of Edmund Wilson, Islands in the Stream has met with little intelligent criticism. Now that the novel is out in paperback a few words might advertise the book's importance. There is no question that Hemingway's eminence has diminished in the years following A Moveable Feast. Many are now repulsed by his personality,…