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….
To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover -Wallace Stevens There's a type of poem very much among us which means to sound compassionate and which tries to tell the reader how he ought to feel about the nonspecific predicament of an often unspecified person. Here, for instance, is Peter…
The novel is alive, of course, was never even close to dead, and seems now to be enjoying something very much like a golden age, a period that people in fifty or a hundred years can look back on as we now do on Victorian fiction, or English Renaissance drama. Since I cannot possibly prove…
Except for critics like Hilton Kramer and George Levine in The New York Times Book Review or Naomi Bliven in The New Yorker, Martin Green's reviewers have treated each book in isolation, remarking with surprise that here is a very smart man whom we must keep our eye on. This is unfortunate, because Green's work…
Roth seems to me the most gifted novelist now writing, at least if one puts a stress on tradition in using the word novelist. He translates his intelligence and his feelings into the terms specific to serious fiction, with more firmness than Bellow, more richness than Mailer, more patience and steadiness and taste and tact…
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