Book Description In a grimy boardinghouse in a dismal Parisian neighborhood, Balzac sets the stage for his 1834 study of paternal love, greed, envy, and despair. Pêre Goriot tells the story of a nineteenth-century counterpart to King Lear, a father so blindly devoted to his undeserving daughters that his tragic realization??I loved them too much…
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…
Chase Twichell, The Lover of God, translations of poems by Rabindranath Tagore: The result of a five-year collaboration between Twichell and a Bengali scholar, Tony Stewart, this fascinating book offers twenty-two poems about a love affair between a young girl and the god Krishna. (Copper Canyon)
Full Moon Boat Poems by Fred Marchant. Graywolf Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Its title and first poem proclaim Fred Marchant’s fine Full Moon Boat an odyssey inverted, defining an alternative to the ideal of the heroic return from war. Pressure from the family to adopt the martial model comes early, an…
Tom Sleigh's new book is introduced by the title poem, his translation from Dante's "Purgatorio," in which the speaker wakes from a dream of his own destruction. The brilliant long poem which follows it, "Endings," is a ranging philosophical narrative whose speaker has received a deadly medical prognosis and wills himself to penetrate and renew…
Whirling Round the Sun Poems by Suzanne Noguere. Midmarch Arts Press, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. The title poem of Suzanne Noguere’s Whirling Round the Sun transforms a bus ride through a city in autumn into an epiphany, in which “leaf / by leaf turning” serves as “a clue / to earth’s revolution.”…
Professor Laura Coltelli of the University of Pisa has devoted many years to the oral and written literature, and the varied culture, of American Indians. She now brings us a revealing volume of interviews with eleven contemporary Indian writers. Six are women: Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Wendy Rose, and Leslie…
The Long Home Poems by Christian Wiman. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by H. L. Hix. Poets’ voices seldom emerge fully formed: first books more often air promise than plenitude, recklessness than resonance. But Christian Wiman’s The Long Home, winner of the 1998 Nicholas Roerich Prize, speaks with mature authority. The Long Home…
Philip Levine recommends The Mortal City, translations by William Matthews of one hundred epigrams by the Latin poet Martial: “The best book of translations I’ve read in ages. Matthews manages to make a first-century a.d. poet who wrote in Latin sound both like a Roman and a contemporary. All the wit you find in Matthews’s…
Spring 2016 - Digital