Maxine Kumin recommends The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Sue Ellen Thompson: “Ninety-four poets are represented in this collection, ranging from the usual suspects to some very bright up-and-comers. There are also photos and bio material, making this a rich, worthy addition to the general library and the poetry lover’s bookshelf.”…
Gerald Stern recommends Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, poems by Ashley Capps: “I love the scorching details of Capps’s poems, as well as their withering honesty, their modesty, their crazy imagination, and their cunning. And I love their moral stance and their gracefulness.” (Akron)
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…
Winter 1979 - Digital