Poetry
Tadeusz Różewicz’s best poems are blunt hammer strokes that pound at the impossibility of crafting poetry true to the sins of history.
Kevin Young’s poetic line is generally on the concise side, generating a pithy, earthy, evocative quality that hovers somewhere between the haiku-like jazziness of Robert Creeley and the delta blues of Son House or Skip James.
Throughout his writing, poet Seamus Heaney’s penetrating imagination is one that strives for accuracy.
Yoko Ono has always been the kind of artist more interested in getting into your head than convincing you to occupy hers.
While I believe that merely publishing these days is an act of entrepreneurial legerdemain, I direct you to a pair of Canadian poets who have gone one step beyond.
This meticulous biography of Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov is the labor of many years and of deep reflection and care.
Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical fiction draws deeply on his own childhood in Fez during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s.
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.
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.
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.
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