This meticulous biography of Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov is the labor of many years and of deep reflection and care.
May 222013
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 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 142013
David Allen Sullivan has no combat experience here or abroad, but his verse offers a poignant vision of the sights, sounds, and passions of the Iraq War. Matt Kraunelis replicates the landscapes of his hometown, planting the reader’s feet firmly in the Merrimack Valley.
Apr 122013
This anthology, made up of Michael Wolfe’s superb translations of ancient Greek epitaphs, begins in prehistory and ends in the sixth century C.E.
Feb 222013
“The Beginning-End of Yiddish,” is poet/essayist Richard Fein’s core subject: his love for a language largely eviscerated in his lifetime.
Feb 122013
Poems of concise and precise description and philosophy find their way among poems of memory and daily life, money, art, love, and the oddities in giving names. J. Kates’s technique is alive and various throughout.
Feb 032013
Consider these few notes my handing The Porcupine of Mind off to you — you read it, you write about it, then we’ll come back and talk.
Sep 232012
Alice Oswald’s “Memorial” begins with a list of 214 names, a bare, sorrowful cousin to the ship’s roll. If you know the old stories, you’ll begin to recognize some names, and then start to look forward to others.
Aug 242012
If the poems in “That Said: New and Selected Poems” had been ordered differently, the volume would have made more of its virtues.
Jul 112012
Poet Mel Kenne, like a desert ascetic, has pared away everything that is not essential -— no words have been wasted in the making of this collection.
May 022012
Swarms in the train station! Improv in the library! Video game hits and poetry! Must be Jazz Week–and there’s plenty more, including a major CD release by Argentinian bassist Fernando Huergo paying tribute to the land of the Albiceleste.
Apr 192012
“An Accident of Hope” is a fascinating read for anyone interested in writers, writing, psychotherapy, women, medical ethics and American society just before the great upheaval of the 1960s.
Apr 042012
The strength of the poetry is the ambiance it creates. Narrative is almost totally submerged in imagery, which may seem natural enough in verse but often is not the case.
Feb 212012
In light of the many translations of Cyprian Norwid’s verse into English, Danuta Borchardt thought carefully about what she was going to focus on.
Jan 202012
Certainly part of the power of Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry resides in how, having established a jagged consciousness, he leaves us in between—in a world full of questions that are not easily resolved.
Dec 182011
Is it true that if I love my neighbor I can, or will, like myself? This question cuts to the heart of the poems in Heni Cole’s volume “Touch,” and the answer is yes.
Oct 082011
In locales as varied as Israel, Kenya, Massachusetts, and the country of the brain, and in rough groupings of poems about small daily epiphanies, relationships, loss and death, and the sad affairs of the world, the poems in “The Illustrated Edge” explore the meandering paths of all sorts and mixtures of feelings.