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…
"Where there is room for error," Charles Martin writes, meditating on the past which has been forged by the articulation of the bones of dinosaurs at the Brooklyn Museum, "there is room for us." It is very much the theme of these poems and the ruined, ruinous, funny and terrifying world they conjure. Martin was…
Robert B. Shaw's Comforting the Wilderness (Wesleyan, 1977) deserves attention not only because it is a very good first collection of poems, but also because it raises the question of where American poetry is going at the moment. It exemplifies, I think, a gradual revival of interest in the well-made poem. Since Robert Lowell and…
In England, by and large, poets are in the habit of looking backwards and inwards. They are obsessed with the tradition of Auden and Larkin; they write nostalgically (and neatly) about themselves, their childhoods, their love affairs, their politics. There is a whole generation of younger poets who have circumambiated the innovations of Eliot and…
Anne Stevenson has been around, quietly, for some time now. Born in England, daughter of the philosopher C. L. Stevenson, she grew up in New Haven and Ann Arbor, married and moved to England almost twenty years ago. She published two books of verse in this country, most importantly Reversals (Wesleyan, 1969). Then Oxford University…
The Nightingale What is it to be free? The unconfined Lose purpose, strength, and at the last, the mind. ANTHONY HECHT: a couplet to accompany Aesop The American poets who were born up and down the 1920s have come into their full powers and fame well before now, though the contours of some careers have…
A long time ago I watched Margaret Mead's film, Four Families, with a bunch of high school kids. While I sat there, wholly mesmerized by the dark flow of those domestic images with their latent and compelling content, the kids' responses had been quite different. "Is that all there is?" one prescient fourteen-year-old demanded: "Eating,…
Along with its counterparts in Europe and the United States, Canadian fiction during the past half century or so has been moving beyond the limits of literal realism, though this departure has not been as radical or as consistent as it has been elsewhere. Many prominent Canadian writers – Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Hugh Hood,…
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