Nonfiction

1917-1977 O to break loose, like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall – raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten steps of the roaring ladder, and then to clear the top on the last try, alive enough to spawn and die. Stop, back off. The salmon…

"Kees was a very good poet." "He is an important poet, among the three or four best of his generation." "Within its definitions this is poetry of a major order." "If the air were not so empurpled with bids for the bardic chair, we might hear his voice more clearly." Those who have had the…

For someone like myself, who writes in a language she was not born into, the second language assumes and retains a special fascination. We absorb our first language long before we speak it, and we learn to speak it fluently without ever becoming conscious of the learning process. The second language – in my case…

Consciousness and Community in Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 Adrienne Rich has explored the relationship of personal and political consciousness in her poetry for the past 25 years. She has achieved a new synthesis of private and public experience in her most recent work, The Dream of a Common Language:…

In a world full of mangoes, hurricanes, armchairs and muskrats, how does a poet choose just two things for an original and truthful comparison? How does he select two things that are similar but not too similar? Good metaphors must surprise us by their unexpected combinations but they must still hang together; A must, in…

(Ecco Press, $6.95) This poetry, intelligent and delicately worded, full of hard appraisals, has as its objects and experiences the domestic and traditional: gray '43 pennies, landscapes and eyesight, local wisdom, family history and neighborhood, marriage and children, friends and poetry itself. Her subject is her own vision, intelligent and emotional, in which an exciting…

James Wright. To a Blossoming Pear Tree. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. 62 pp. $7.95. Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Mother Poem. Oxford University Press, 1977. 117 pp. $6.50. Barry Goldensohn. Uncarving the Block. Vermont Crossroads Press, 1977. 62 pp. No price listed. Jane Shore. Eye Level. University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. 86 pp. No price listed….

I too have favorite candidates for whatever literature of the 1970's ought to survive. The poems of Amon Liner and James Applewhite ought to last on, and Marguerite Yourcenar's novel The Abyss and Mary Lee Settle's Blood Tie, and the stories of Eve Shelnutt. I have no real confidence that these works will survive. Almost…

The poems of Joyce Peseroff are a great pleasure to read. Many of them (though I will not try to illustrate this here) are very funny; and many of them enter the mind with a persistent force that is startling. "Startling" seems right because Peseroff's way of writing does not involve the loud noises or…