Wiman’s Mandelstam (and Mine)
One evening about thirty five years ago, I was browsing the poetry shelves of College Hill Bookstore, in Providence, and picked up the Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by…
Stolen Air, Broken Voice
Osip Emilevich Mandelstam was born in Warsaw, a European Jew, in 1891. A subject of the Russian empire, his family was granted the right to move to St. Petersburg when…
Getting Off and Getting Even
Vagina. It announces itself, a magnum opus on female sexuality. We start, ironically, with the ending. Naomi Wolf’s orgasms, once reliable, have mysteriously gone astray. The cause? A late diagnosis…
It Is in What the Poem Does:
On The Poetry of Ben Mazer
“The poem does an undoglike thing: it purrs.” —Christopher Ricks Even though I made Ben Mazer’s acquaintance only recently (we met at a conference in Claremont this March), in reading…
Truncated Memory: Carissa Halston’s The Mere Weight of Words
In her short story, “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” Alice Munro pulls off a spectacular flash-forward. It begins with more than a page of details about the parents of…
Letters in Flight: The Peripatetics of Joseph Roth
Do not read these letters if you admire the novels of Joseph Roth. Do not read these letters if you hope to learn more about the novels you admire. The…
Anti-Social Behavior: the Novel
Asked in a 1995 interview about his fascination with Milton, Martin Amis described the loss of innocence in Paradise Lost as “the basic tragic story of our culture.” Milton, Amis…
The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers
The recently published multi-volume Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, with easy to read large font in generous layout, is lavish in its design, and the ongoing multi-volume Collected Letters of…
Bunting’s Persia
Basil Bunting often goes unacknowledged as a major contributing innovator of Modern poetry in English. Rather unfortunately — as Bunting had no love of Academics — the lapse in knowledge…