Book Review

rev. of Days Going/Days Coming Back by Eleanor Ross Taylor

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…

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rev. of From Room to Room by Jane Kenyon

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…

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rev. of Definition of the Soul by John Skoyles

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…

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rev. of From this Distance by Susan Snively

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…

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The Mind Afoot: rev. of Descending Figure by Louise Glück

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…

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rev. of Fuel by Naomi Shihab Nye

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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rev. of Desiring Flight by Christine Balk

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…

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rev. of Ghost Letters by Richard McCann

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…

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rev. of Animals by Alice Mattison

For sheer corporeal presence in verse, it would be hard to match Alice Mattison. Her best subject is motherhood, including pregnancy (no need to say " enceinte" in this case). No subject holds more boredom or fascination for us. As Adrienne Rich has noted, we tend either to make too much or too little of…

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