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…
Desiring Flight Poems by Christianne Balk. Purdue Univ. Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. Among the many pleasures of Christianne Balk’s Desiring Flight, two stand out. First, Balk has — as she showed in her Walt Whitman Award-winning Bindweed — a biologist’s precise knowledge of the natural world, and consequently her poems convey, at…
GHOST LETTERS Poems by Richard McCann. Alice James Books, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Rafael Campo. A dear patient of mine, a poet himself, who died not too long ago from complications of AIDS, once explained to me why he spent so much of his precious time and energy writing. “My poems are in a sense…
Devolution of the Nude Poems by Lynne McMahon. David R. Godine, Publisher, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by David Daniel. The best works in Lynne McMahon’s Devolution of the Nude seem like found poems, unlikely jewels turned up in some nearby but rarely visited garden of the mind. The freshness of her language provides both delight and…
In poem after poem in Giacometti's Dog, Robin Becker's third book, there is a courage in the piercing details that keeps the work from flinching from feeling and avoids even a trace of self-indulgence. These poems, generous in their emotional and geographical range, speak in Becker's voice about loss, guilt, erotic yearning, and the journey…
In a way, Disturbing the Peace bears a special relation to Yates's early t.b. ward stories — "Out With The Old," "No Pain Whatsoever," and "Thieves" (published here for the first time) — I guess to the extent the "affliction" of the protagonist can only be questioned in impersonally moral terms: the unafflicted are merely…
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