Editor's Shelf

Mary Gordon recommends Ideas of Heaven, stories by Joan Silber: "This original, finely wrought collection deals with spiritual issues, always with a combination of grace and lightness." (Norton)

DeWitt Henry recommends Garrett in Wedlock, stories by Paul Mandelbaum: "In this ‘novel-in-stories,’ Garrett, who feels ‘himself to be without ethnic heritage,’ is thrown into a jumble of heritages by love of his wife and her two children by earlier marriages, one to a Norwegian adventurer, the other to an Indian bigamist. The Norwegian comes…

Maxine Kumin recommends Horses and the Human Soul, poems by Judith Barrington: "The poem, Barrington writes, ‘has lodged in my heart like a stone in the shoe.’ It is a perfect image for recollection. Here are the horses of her English childhood and the outbreak of World War II filtered through family reminiscence, her coming…

Philip Levine recommends From the Meadow, selected and new poems by Peter Everwine: "This collection presents all of Everwine’s poems that he still regards with affection in a career that spans forty years or more, many of the poems never collected before. It includes a few of his remarkable translations from the Hebrew as well…

Joyce Peseroff recommends Letters to Jane, correspondence by Hayden Carruth: "While researching Jane Kenyon’s papers archived at the UNH library, I came across a file of letters written to her by Hayden Carruth during the long months of her illness. Carruth didn’t expect a reply; he didn’t write to be cheery or tell her to…

Robert Pinsky recommends Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, a biography by Stephen Greenblatt: "To recommend a best-seller? Strange in a way, but Ploughshares readers should know that Greenblatt is a real writer. Unlike many a ‘noted scholar’ he writes wonderful sentences and paragraphs. Here is a book about a literary writer that…

Maxine Kumin recommends This Smoke that Carried Us, poems by René Char, translated by Susanne Dubroff: “This volume of selected poems, with a sensitive and informative introduction by Christopher Merrill, is an essential document of World War II. Many of these poems were written while parachutists were dropping behind enemy lines, but the subject matter,…

C. D. Wright recommends Altazor, poetry by Vincente Huidrobro, translated by Eliot Weinberger: “A book-length poem from the twenties that continues to set the mind on fire. An exhilarating tribute to the future, which is perhaps the only place it is reasonable to aspire since the present is nonetheless interesting but a deadly spot in…

DeWitt Henry recommends When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother, nonfiction by Thomas J. Cottle: “Cottle’s memoir of his mother, Gitta Gradova, a prominent concert pianist, is first a biography that evokes her career, performances, and friendships with such greats as Rachmaninoff, Toscanini, Heifetz, and Horowitz, giving us a cross section of classical music’s inner…