Jim Kates

Book Review: Rachel Hadas'”Pastorals” — Everything We Want Poetry To Do

July 24, 2025
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Rachel Hadas’s book of prose poems is a set of meditations grounded in a life well lived and much observed, an experimental field for examining the nature of [human] potentialities.

Book Review: “On Frost and Eliot” — No Contest

April 10, 2025
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The value of “On Frost and Eliot” is sending the reader spinning out of its own text and back to poems by two of the major poets of the 20th century, each of whom has suffered from the vagaries of fashion, both in popularity and neglect.

Book Review: “Nat Turner, Black Prophet” — An Evangelical Rebellion

August 10, 2024
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Authors Anthony E. Kaye  and Gregory P. Downs claim that Nat Turner would have seen himself as a Christian prophet.

Theater Review: “Ben Butler” — A Verbally Dexterous Comedy About Serious Business

August 1, 2024
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This production brings the Peterborough Players back in line with their own best traditions: entertaining, thoughtful, delightfully irreverent.

Poetry Review: “Catullus: Selected Poems” — A Comfortable Intro to an Uncomfortable Poet

April 24, 2024
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Translator Stephen Mitchell serves Catullus best with the poems that don’t demand cleverness, where the sentiment is at least seemingly direct.

Poetry Review: “The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz” — A Necessary and Welcome Gift

April 2, 2024
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Let’s hope that this book will provide an overdue and well deserved third act for the poetry of one of the twentieth century’s poetic masters.

Poetry Review: Ishion Hutchinson’s “School of Instructions” — Lured Through History

November 23, 2023
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Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson’s New-World, nonwhite perspective claims its own stake in a history that we have come too much to associate with its imperialist heavyweights.

Poetry Review: Robert Desnos’s “Night of Loveless Nights” — Far From Ephemeral

June 16, 2023
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A reprint from 50 years ago, this small book brings to the English-speaking world a strategic introduction to the work of a major French poet of the twentieth century.

Book Review: A Life of Russian Poet Osip Mandelstam — “An Attenuated Voice of Freedom”

May 25, 2023
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The biography is a workmanlike introduction, valuable because it brings a measured understanding to Osip Mandelstam’s life and poetry as well as to the horrific decades he lived through.

Book Review: “Waging a Good War” — A Civil Rights Strategy for the Future

April 1, 2023
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In this valuable history, Thomas E. Ricks looks at the critical events of “The Second Reconstruction” as a series of campaigns in a nonviolent war.

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