Book Review

Ecco’s much earlier anthology Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (1976), edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand, brought important poets to the attention of North American readers. The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry’s vast and sweeping ambition covers much more territory, providing work based on one criterion, “the quality of the poem…

Jack Myers’ posthumous book, The Memory of Water, contains many of his finest poems. Mark Cox, who assembled the manuscript with Jack’s widow, Thea Temple, provides a lucid and moving account of Jack’s life and work in his Foreword to the collection. As was true for almost all of Myers’ books, the writer and speaker…

Christie Hodgen’s third book is the story of Mary Murphy and the five people in her life she will never forget. The story unfolds through the elegies of these five and their somewhat seamy lives and how they have shaped Mary into the woman she is today. Mary and her sister, Malinda are burdened with…

Stanley Moss published his first book, The Wrong Angel, in 1966. This current volume represents forty-three years of writing and almost three hundred poems, seventy-five of which are new, and shows the extent of his accomplishment in full force. There’s a brooding quality to this work, an engagement with the eternal verities: the search for…

It is not true, although it is sometimes ungenerously suggested, that the practitioners of contemporary poetry and its readership are one and the same set of people, but it does seem to be true that poetry reviewing is at present done mainly by poets. Since poets read more poetry and have thought harder about it…

Abbott Awaits, Chris Bachelder’s third novel, is as different from his second, U.S.! (a fantasia-parable about the American left, in which socialist and novelist Upton Sinclair is serially resurrected and serially assassinated), as his second was from his first, Bear vs. Shark (the nation is collectively distracted from all other matters, public or private, by…

When Eleanor Ross Taylor received the Poetry Foundation’s prestigious Ruth Lilly prize in 2010, Christian Wiman predicted most readers would be unfamiliar with her work. Indeed, although Taylor has been writing startlingly original, commanding poems for decades, the announcement of the prize was met in my household with “Eleanor Ross who?” Luckily, this new and…

Mark Twain once remarked that God invented war to teach Americans geography. If my knowledge of the Middle East is indicative, it may be time for us to try a different strategy. Even with revolutions spreading from country to country, and heavy American involvement in about half of them, I was stunned to discover—when I…

At the end of the second section of the extended lecture from which this short volume takes its title, Durs Grünbein says that he “might even go so far as to say that poetry is in large part born from the desire to start over as often as possible.” Whether or not this is true…