"The visible points to the invisible," writes Sarah Appleton in Ladder of the World's Joy. This is the basic statement, the ars poetica, of a writer for whom every thing means more than itself. In an explanatory note at the end, Sarah Appleton recounts her indebtedness to Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, which…
Hurdy Gurdy Poems by Tim Seibles. Cleveland State University Press, $10.00 paper. Reviewed by Tony Hoagland. Appetite, revenge, and celebration are the animating energies in Tim Seibles’s generous-hearted and rambunctious first collection, Hurdy Gurdy. As the title implies, this is street music of a kind, alternately plaintive and rapturous as it explores issues of adulthood…
Large Animals in Everyday Life Stories by Wendy Brenner. Univ. of Georgia Press, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Wendy Brenner’s stunning first collection of stories, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, is marked by her dark humor, deft stylistic range, and joyous use of language. Whether an ice cream salesgirl in…
In her poem "The Homeless in America," which appeared in the Twentieth Anniversary issue of this magazine, Diann Blakely Shoaf describes a photograph — on exhibit at Parthenon Centennial Park, Nashville — of a mother grooming her son's hair: "How do I even know the child's / alive? — his mother's half-smile / so naked…
Last Things A novel by Jenny Offill. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23.00 cloth. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. Jenny Offill’s stunning debut novel, Last Things, captures the crucial years in the life of a young narrator trying to choose between a conventional but remote father and a mesmerizing but insane mother. In the mid-1980’s, Grace Davitt…
In Hush, by David St. John, we see a conscious movement away from the lyrical voice, to a simpler, more prose-like form. This tendency in poetry is at least sixty years old now, if we trace it to the Imagist school, and much older and more universal if we consider the efforts at plain speech…
Late Empire Poems by David Wojahn. Pittsburgh Poetry Series, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf. “History has to live with what was here,” wrote Lowell in one of his offhand but authoritative pronouncements. In an age emerging from the New Critical hegemonic concept of literary and historical tradition that Lowell was schooled on,…
Igloo Among Palms Stories by Rod Val Moore. Univ. of Iowa, $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. Selected by Joy Williams for the 1994 Iowa Short Fiction Award, Rod Val Moore’s Igloo Among Palms proves to be a highly original and engaging collection. Set in dusty towns on both sides of the California-Mexico border, the…
Jane Kenyon's third book of poems is deceptively quiet, gorgeously written, fierce and lyrical, stuffed with the luminous details of the ordinary world. It's a book struggling for vision and written out of deep necessity, and so it's hard to quote from — the poems make up a whole cloth. But passionate spiritual inquiry is…
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