This meticulous biography of Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov is the labor of many years and of deep reflection and care.
May 222013
May 202013
This Judicial Review deals with the Boston premiere of John Harbison’s opera version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Read the reactions and join the conversation.
May 172013
Deadpan sarcasm perfectly pitched, absurdity of target (and publisher) punctured with a minimum of muss and fuss.
May 122013
Despite “Middle C”’s relative cheeriness, the novel passes a tough sentence on the human race, so uncompromising that its protagonist has a hard time writing it down.
May 092013
There is a steadiness about Nicholas Roe’s writing that is deceptive; the life in the Life does not jump off the page, but it accumulates during the reading so that something of what it felt like to be around John Keats remains, as things do when truly experienced.
May 082013
“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” is spectacular.
May 072013
While reading Andre Maurois’ “Climates” you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.
May 022013
What is Harvard Square today but a shopping spree waiting to happen, a student lounge, a food court? What could a novel gain by being set in that venue?
May 012013
Simultaneously storyteller and player, ancient character and modern respondent, Denis O’Hare’s performance of “An Iliad” elicits the kind of respect automatically granted this genre of demanding monologual performance.
Apr 302013
Susanne M. Sklar’s study is the best exploration of William Blake’s miraculously bewildering masterpiece that I know of — thoughtful, scholarly, imaginative, and supremely sympathetic to the poet’s ornery complexity as well as his capacity to inspire wonder.
Apr 302013
The best parts of this book of interviews come when Charles Mingus or his collaborators talk about the music.
Apr 252013
Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical fiction draws deeply on his own childhood in Fez during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s.
Apr 212013
If I suffered half as much from the thought that most art has been lost as I suffer every day from the recollection of departed family and friends, I would be in a mental hospital. In this sense, I found myself resisting the message of “The Melancholy Art,” to the point that I felt that the book was laying a guilt trip on me.
Apr 202013
Part of what made “The Dream Merchant” so compelling, and at times, harrowing, a read for me are its themes: love, loss, rags and riches, to be sure, but also the theme of aging, and associated loss of power and possibility.
Apr 202013
James Longenbach’s ear for the nuances of diction, tone, stress, and the material aspects of poetry is so good, and his grasp of context and biography so assured, one wonders why the essays so often tie themselves into semantic and logical knots.
Apr 192013
In her groundbreaking study, Tufts University professor Alisha Rankin essentially revises the history of medicine by showing that women, presumed to be marginal in the development early modern medicine, were actually major players.
Apr 172013
Moving restlessly between independence and interdependence in style and content, the lecture captures the changeling quality that Gish Jen associates with those who must creatively manage multiple cultural influences.
Apr 162013
There are so many characters to root for in “The Wanting” that you tend to read with your head swimming, and with an increasing sense of urgency as the senseless is revealed to have a logic of its own.