The poem of Gilgamesh, recreated by David Ferry from the thirtieth-century B.C. epic which is itself a retelling of an older Sumerian text, is best known by most readers for a tale of the Flood, complete with Sumerian Noah, that parallels Genesis. But the full narrative is a more troubling, darker story of a stormy-hearted…
Robert Stone's highly-praised first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, told of a down-and-out alcoholic radio announcer named Rheinhardt, of his doomed affair with a touching slattern named Geraldine, and of his involvement with ultra right wing politics. Good as it was, there were major flaws with that first work. For one thing, the story, couched…
Glass, Irony, and God Poems by Anne Carson. New Directions, $14.00 paper. Reviewed by Liam Rector. Poet and editor James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, is still acquiring poetry that is importantly new, poetry that still sets and extends new directions. Again taking up the battle cry of his essential mentor, Ezra Pound, Laughlin has…
Domestic Work Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Kevin Young. In a voice confident, diverse, and directed, Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work does what a first book should, and more, all while avoiding what first books often do — either borrowing themes from other poets or recycling a narrow vision of family…
Good Hope Road Poems by Stuart Dischell. Viking, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff. While fretting over “environmental destruction,” an old man faces his own mortality. A woman waiting for a tow truck wishes she were older or younger, “that what she had been / Waiting for all her life would finally begin to happen.”…
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…
Through over twenty years of publication, William Corbett's books have steadily and thoroughly documented a life examined through art, offering a series of poems which, as the poet explains in Don't Think: Look, "enable the feeling eye to enact in words what it has seen." What's seen is rarely spectacle; rather, Corbett pursues the illuminating…
"Easy writing's curst hard reading," says Sheridan the witty playwright, and one reads Anne Bernays' prose so effortlessly and with such speed that he is inclined to think it is his own accomplishment and not the author's. But the art is there, leading us on, deftly sorting the German Jews from the Russian Jews by…
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