Editor's Shelf

Donald Hall recommends Eastern Mountain Time, poems by Joyce Peseroff: “These poems are local and universal, intimate accounts of landscape and people—with an almost pervasive shadow of elegy. In ‘The Ridge’ she makes a tableau of the dead, from a friend to a father. Always loss is mixed with joy, especially in the natural world—no…

Madeline DeFrees recommends Overtime, poems by Joseph Millar: “Take a sensibility of remarkable delicacy and precision, immerse it in the abrasive, often violent atmosphere of twentieth-century blue-collar America, and what you get is a chronicle of drink, debt, and divorce: a story not unlike that of Raymond Carver. Joseph Millar’s Overtime includes some of the…

Marilyn Hacker recommends Little Ice Age, poems by Maureen Seaton: “There are very few poets of whom I might say, ‘It is inexplicable why this work is not better known, celebrated for all it’s worth.’ Maureen Seaton is a poet like that. Her register is enormous, her verbal daring and wayfaring breathtaking; while the solidity…

Philip Levine recommends Skirts and Slacks, poems by W. S. Di Piero: “In his new book, the poet W. S. Di Piero manages to place the reader in specific places at particular times with such ease and authority that after a single reading I felt close to lives I’d known nothing about and cared nothing…

Gary Soto recommends Star Apocrypha, poems by Christopher Buckley: “Buckley has been the master of nostalgia in his previous eight collections, and once again he has distinguished himself with a sorrow for the Santa Barbara of his childhood, for music, for his late friend and inspiration Larry Levis, and-this is scary-for the middle age moving…