Jeff Gundy, Book Reviewer

View Full Profile

Book Review

The Day Before

by Jeff Gundy

This poet pursues something more, less, or perhaps simply other than the ordinary. These poems are always attentive to memory and filled with brisk, fully realized physical description. What sets them apart is their intensity and... Read More

Book Review

The Tower of Diverse Shores

by Jeff Gundy

These ambitious, playful, ingenious poems are not for everyone. Those who demand that poetry be “accessible,” no matter how clunky and cumbersome the ramps and railings involved, may well retreat from this poet’s vivid but oblique... Read More

Book Review

Climbing the Divide

by Jeff Gundy

Over a long, illustrious career the author has practiced and nearly perfected what might be called a Texas plain style. Without fuss or pyrotechnics, his poems draw readers into a life both unexceptional and extraordinary, made so by the... Read More

Book Review

The Palace of Ashes

by Jeff Gundy

These lively poems press deeply into their places and the meanings of place. The first section, shadowed by the mile-long piles of culm extracted from coal mines and the harsh realities of life in coal towns like Taylor, Pennsylvania,... Read More

Book Review

White Soul

by Jeff Gundy

Thoreau remarked that he would not write so much about himself if there were anyone else he knew as well. Readers who understand what he meant, but still find themselves fascinated by the endless efforts we make to explain ourselves to... Read More

Book Review

Footnotes to an Unfinished Poem

by Jeff Gundy

As the title advertises, this new book is not itself a poem but the footnotes to one that the author insists exists only as “a text that its unnamed author could only fractionally complete.” Since T. S. Eliot added his famous... Read More

Book Review

Motion

by Jeff Gundy

Given the American obsession with sports, it is hardly surprising that many American poets should have turned their attention that way. In this generous gathering of sports poems, the editor offers something for just about everyone, with... Read More

Load More