Nonfiction

Amanda Pierson has a good eye, a fine ear, and a wanderer's heart. Born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey, Amanda traveled south following her graduation from Dartmouth College, and it is there-in the climate of Porter and Faulkner-that she began to discover her voice as a writer. Much has been made of the verbal…

I met Noy Holland six years ago at a writers' conference at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where Barry Hannah wild man stories were still rife, though he had been gone from there a couple of years. The title of the conference was Voicelust, and Tuscaloosa, lush with boredom, marital breakup, dog racing, the…

I • THE VAST SLEEP OF THINGS 1 Carthage Is Burning If only this sleep could be wind, I told myself, a dark stirring of it out of Egypt, the wind which rots all sails and cannot rot and is beyond age-not the scirocco with its one obsession; not the chinook thawing the ice on…

Craig Raine's new kind of poetry has yet to reach a substantial audience in the United States. But, if the reviews can be believed, Raine's reputation in Britain exceeds that of any contemporary poet on this side of the Atlantic. Raine's four books- The Onion, Memory, A Martian Sends a Post Card Home, Rich, and…

I discovered Craig Raine's work (first his remarkable second book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and then his first book The Onion, Memory) about eight years ago. I was immediately struck by its eloquence, which is never stuffy or merely decorative, by the sharpness of its tone, and by the odd rightness of its…

Asked what he worked at, Oscar Wilde's brother Willie would reply, "At intervals." This kind of innocuous controlled explosion which sends a phrase sky-high the moment before it reassembles, younger and wiser and apparently unfazed, is analogous to the effect achieved by certain poems. It defamiliarizes, yes, but mostly in order to refamiliarize. It glamorizes…

There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca . . . . I distinctly remember wondering, stroll- ing the bright and un-blasted streets, why it was that all the other American cities weren't depopulated now that their young people were free once again to get up…

Déconstruction est passée, as they say on the Champs-Elysées. One mirror facing another inside a mirrored sphere spins scintillations too tiny and brief to illuminate the unetherized body slabbed for autopsy. Deconstruction is reflective, but of what? Of collective despair, some scholars think. Though we each push our own hopes before us like wheel-barrows through…

The original intention of editing an issue of Ploughshares was a collection of dramatic verse, either written directly for theatrical performance or adaptable for the stage. There were few submissions. Instead, resolutely lyrical poems came, altering intention. There are many names I would have liked to see here, but the pleasures of discovery of new…