Poetry
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Few would disagree, if pressed, that the word “essential” is overused. That’s not the case with this book. The essence of James Reaney’s poetic works has been more than adequately distilled in this slim volume. Both the preface and the afterword allude to the fact that Reaney’s literary and artistic accomplishments encompassed several areas: poetry, of course; but also, plays, short stories, and novels. In his later career, he was, in fact, more recognized for his playwriting than his poetry...
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After an absence of thirty-odd years, Lou Lipsitz makes his return to poetry, offering highlights from his first two books as well as two volumes of new poems which trace the maturation of the poet as a man and a writer. The selections from the original two books dazzle with unexpected metaphors carried well past their logical ends and surreal turns slyly executed at exactly the right moment. The later two volumes lack the bite of their predecessors, but the newer, more mellow poems still...
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In the film, The Shawshank Redemption, the narrator recalls his first night in prison, saying, “When they put you in that cell, and those bars slam home, that’s when you know it’s for real. A whole life blown away in the blink of an eye. Nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it.” For Brad Moschetti, who was sentenced to twelve years, prison held the potential to break him, to crush his spirit. But miraculously, it didn’t. Among the many things Moschetti discovered...
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In improvisational jazz, it’s common for a soloist to take a riff or a phrase of a beloved song and musically change it so that listeners can hear something entirely new —a song that acknowledges the original idea while expanding or enhancing it into something uniquely wonderful. In a way, this is what Wilma Hudgins is doing in her book of poetry, I Saw My God Today While Walking the Path of Life.
This collection of religious, free verse poems, originally published in the...
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Meanderings of An Aged Mind, the title of retired junior high teacher Kay Fay’s slim volume of poetry, gives her licence to expound upon any number of subjects that she knows best—schools, schoolchildren, homework, parenting, spirituality, and reflections on growing older. After opening with three of her best efforts, “8th Grade,” “Criticism,” and “8th Grade Girls,” the teacher’s orderly mind takes over to ruminate on an alphabetically arranged series of sixty-six topics from A to W...
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In this collection, Tony Barnstone explores the events of World War II in the Pacific from both sides of the conflict. As his poem “Hindsight” puts it, “Seems everyone has points of view / but no one has perspective.”
Juxtaposing the voices of many different participants—from American GIs to Japanese doctors, from Navy nurses in the Philippines to housewives in Tokyo, from scientists building the bomb to the ones who survived it—Barnstone evokes the brutality and banality of war as... -
As its title suggests, the poems in The Snowbound House contain images of dichotomies: cozy, frightening, warm, freezing. Relaxing in the comfort of home competes with thrilling danger. With the house as setting and metaphor, the poet leaves and comes back. When he returns, even though this house had once been home, the son is still strangely separated.
Throughout the book, Seely explores estrangement between the younger man and his forebears: a natural separation between generations... -
On February 9, 1994, after being evicted from his Paris apartment, the Romanian poet Gherasim Luca committed suicide by jumping into the Seine River. Though tragic, his death could hardly have been a shock to his readers. For the previous forty-two years Luca had been living illegally in France, publishing dozens of volumes of surrealist poetry. His writing was often dark and dwelled on themes of violence and death.
The Inventor of Love, a small book that Luca wrote in the mid-1940s,... -
Meg Kearney’s first book, An Unkindness of Ravens, garnered BOA’s A. Poulin Jr. New Poet’s Award. It’s not surprising that her new collection, Home By Now, continues her practice of unforced, gracefully adept poems that are equally deserving of recognition. In a literary world where poems may become obtuse in order to reflect a fragmented universe, these pieces are refreshingly direct without being simplistic. Kearney’s poems do address an unstable world, but they do so in lines laced with a...
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Disparate cultures around the world have similar stories and myths about the exploits of their gods and heroes. Joseph Campbell said one explanation for these similarities is that “the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world…[and] out of this common ground have come what Jung has called archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths.” Author Paul Kiritsis has tapped into a vein overflowing with the ichors of archetypes. He has transcribed the magical essence...
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Jekwu Ozoemene’s poetry collection, Shadows of Existence, is one with something to say. Here, the poet touches on everything from gender and abuse to poverty and consumerism. These poems focus on the African continent and on a culture that is as unique as it is problematic. Like a badge on a uniform, this poet’s politics are as loud and proud as the poem’s layered rhyme schemes and rich imagery.
The persona poems in this collection are often the most...
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Heather McHugh’s reviews are swarmed by words like “clever,” “play,” and “language games.” She puns, she’s wry, and she foregrounds seriousness in the title of her latest collection. Still the wit, McHugh startles with a fusion of grief, petri dishes, custom, and webcams. She is a poet who can cast into many realms—philosophy, iconography, and theology—with poems unabashedly titled “Dodo’s Caca” and “Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork.”
In the midst of comedy, there is suffering: “...
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The words adventure and poetry are rarely used in the same sentence, but are certainly apropos in Dara Wier’s Selected Poems. There are so many surprises in her work—the ideas, the imagery, the simple and imaginative use of language. Don’t get too relaxed, though, there are complexities in the Weir’s work that require one’s attention and thought, but the payoffs are well worth the efforts.
Selected Poems is a retrospective of Ms. Wier’s work from 1977 up to...
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Although death is frequently evoked in Adrian Blevins’s latest collection, not even drowning can kill the speaker of these poems. As the title suggests, she is what’s coming live (electrified?) from the homesick jamboree. She is sometimes self-deprecating, as in “School of the Arts,” in which she refers to herself as “like some forever raggedy thing forever underwater.” However, there is no doubt of the character’s strength as she navigates her raucous childhood. What is momentarily...
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The grief unique to women plays a central role in Bloch’s fourth collection Blood Honey, here cast in muted shades of irony: “We were sitting on my sofa with his dead wife. / (A good-looking woman, he allowed.)” But the pain of objectification proves to be no match for that of violence; “[The Bullet] passed through her brain at an acute angle…It was then that we knew her, / mantle and magma…Grief / is a strange anger.”
Metaphor, for Bloch, is the device that allows the writer...
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Winner of the Ironweed Press Poetry Prize and one of two collections released by Whitley in 2009, This Is the Red Door is elegiac and meditative. While it takes up residence in the psyche, the book is equally grounded in the material of fruit and kitchen countertops. In the physics of boiling water, in a hairline crack in a bedroom mirror, Whitley can see the subtle workings of our relations and the fate of all things.
Formally diverse, the collection concentrates on the...
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In The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, even a Rilke scholar will find new work within this collection of the Ger-man writer’s notebooks and less-published writings. A mix of poems, prose, and unstructured musings, The Inner Sky contains writing outside of Rilke’s extensive, oft-translated canon, but at the caliber of imagination expected from his better-known works. While the more structured pieces—poetry, short fiction—here read more strongly than the...
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The poems of Self-Portrait with Crayon are haunted. There are no ghosts or goblins lurking, but rather an absent mother and Edgar Degas.
The two apparitions seem unconnected until Allison Benis White skillfully commingles them. The first poem of this collection, “From Degas’ Sketchbook,” finds the speaker hiding in a closet, imagining her mother: “The shoulders are the span of the hanger and the mind is the hook which suspends the entire dress.”...
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Encouraged by her mother’s warm reception of a birthday poem, Yu began writing the poems collected here when she was a mere eight years old. The poems, befitting her age, are simple and warm, optimistic and bright as in this cinquain, “Clouds”:
A cloud
Fluffy and wet
Let the rain go when full
Rains when sad; holds when it’s blissful
Heavenly.Computer-generated pictures accompany the poems adding to the...
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Feza Aazmi gives us a powerful plea for peace not among nations, but between the two leading religions of our day: Christianity and Islam. In this book-length poem he predicts that failure to learn to tolerate each other rather than do battle could result in the destruction of both.
Aazmi’s ostensible target is Samuel Huntington’s controversial book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), but he takes on scholars from both East and West....