First, Body Stories by Melanie Rae Thon. Houghton Mifflin, $21.95 cloth. Reviewed by Christopher Tilghman. Melanie Rae Thon’s fierce, unyielding, and brilliant new stories are now collected in First, Body, and the effect of reading all of them together after seeing many of them when originally published is simply to encounter genius. These stories come…
. . .is a first novel, or first book, rather, full of good stuff, shaped loosely and roughly in the form of therapeutic reminiscence. There's a Writer at work in it, experimenting with styles, working for concision, profundity, and no-bullshit meatiness; now and then showing humor and relaxed gusto, now and then waxing into a…
Folks Like Me Poems by Sam Cornish. Zoland Books, $12.95 cloth. Reviewed by Sven Birkerts. Sam Cornish has written a book that subtly defies the norms. This is not a gathering of “poems,” or a showcase for isolated tours de force, but rather an ambitious vocal collage in which each poem is a voice and…
Like Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Eleanor Ross Taylor is a poet who records in startling detail the mind's passionate and peculiar motion, now supple, now crablike; capable of memory's precise image or its blur. Days Going/Days Coming Back collects new work together with poems from three earlier volumes, and should bring focus and attention…
Jane Kenyon is apparently transplated to New England from Michigan; New England suits her well. Its depressive terrain and weather fit her gusty, solitary moods. Its Puritan heritage, still lived by in those towns, sparks her to spare meditations on the nature of the body, and on living this life. Her first book, From Room…
Definition of the Soul Poems by John Skoyles. Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, $24.95 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. The best poems in John Skoyles’s Definition of the Soul find solace in small scale. Their particular skill — announcing the Looming whose umbrage prompts them, but answering with barely lumen enough to light…
Susan Snively's poems share their predicament with Anne Sexton's. Considering Sexton's life and career, such a comparison can only be made with trepidation. But genuine similarities bring it to mind. Both are attracted to legends, myths, fairy tales (what Snively calls "Mysteries"). Both are interested in dreams, visions, the problems of illusion and reality (Snively…
Much contemporary poetry attempts to charge a landscape with the imaginative self through an allegorical and mythological vision. While poetry of the past tends to place the self in a landscape where it perceives and reacts, our contemporaries frankly reverse the process and locate the landscape in the psyche. This extends what Roy Harvey Pearce…
Fuel Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. BOA Editions, $12.50 paper. Reviewed by Victoria Clausi. The poems in Naomi Shihab Nye’s latest book, Fuel, comprise a world filled with intelligence, warmth, humor, and tenderness. It is a world wherein the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the lived moment links itself to history. It is a world in…
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