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,…
It is easy in one way to review Thomas Lux's Memory's Handgrenade because the book is such a pleasure to read and re-read. It is also easy to be misled: one keeps hearing other voices in his work. There is W.S. Merwin, with whom Lux shares a concern for subjects like gloves (Merwin: "gloves of…
Don’t Erase Me Stories by Carolyn Ferrell. Houghton Mifflin, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Elizabeth Searle. “You ain’t no Body,” a young girl is told in Carolyn Ferrell’s powerfully compassionate first collection, Don’t Erase Me. With a rich variety of voices, Ferrell lets her characters — most of them African-American girls and women — answer back…
Lloyd Schwartz's writing displays a peculiar combination of gifts — observation of personality; loving attention to homely turns of language, neglected as stray cats; a moral generosity that cannot be called "forgiving" because it declines to condemn in the first place; a formal aptitude for triolets and off rhymes; a way of being funny that…
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