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Pierce the Skin, by Henri Cole
an essay by Nora Delaney
What does this continued act of self-portraiture achieve? For one thing, in painting himself over and over again, Cole finds that language fails him. He longs for the preverbal — that direct expression he finds so engaging in the visual artist. issue 7 :: may 2010
Reading Gabriel Gudding
an essay by Henry Gould
If I were foolish enough (and I am) to try to characterize that milieu,
I would say we live in a time of near-systemic obfuscation — political,
economic, educational — amid which the sphere of poetry hovers with an
air of insouciant and facetious cleverness. Poetry per se has
evolved, it seems, into light verse: an occasion for admirable displays
of a poet’s intellectual graces (wit, charm, technical facility, humor,
thoughtfulness, etc.).
issue 6 :: march 2010
In Search of Small Gods, by Jim Harrison
a review by James Stotts
This collection is animated by an alternative religion of humility,
which matches the myths of origin with an ethics of mistaken
identities, where faces are water, where mortality is liquid, where
birds and Volkswagens are confused and conflated. Harrison has remarked
before on the distinction between his novels and poems: attempts at
making sense, and at disturbing it, respectively.
issue 6 :: march 2010
The Us, by Joan Houlihan
a review by Jacob A. Bennett
Twisting syntax and the abuse of grammar are a poet's prerogative, but
these techiques are also always a game of roulette: the lines may clunk
through such contrivance, or the wonder of novelty fade.
issue 6 :: march 2010
Planisphere,
by John Ashbery
review by Daniel E. Pritchard
The planisphere addresses the stars in a way that was once crucial to
success, to survival; now, it is not only the un-modern device of the
chart, but the very reading of stars that is outmoded and expendable.
The world acts in ways unimaginable to those ancient sailors. It is the
very relationship of the address that has been lost. It may be just
that sentiment which Ashbery wishes to explore in Planisphere.
issue 5 :: January 2010
The Arrival,
by Daniel Simko
review by Ailbhe Darcy
In all of the many examples of ekphrasis — poems after artistic or
literary works by Kathe Kollwitz, Balthus, Gunter Eich, Sandoor Csoori,
Lori Reidel, as well as a poem after a photograph “almost taken” — none
makes it possible for the reader to easily look up a specific art piece
on Google Images and compare it with its poem: the natural desire to
judge the “success” of an ekphrastic poem in this way, by mimetic
standards, is thwarted.
issue 5 :: January 2010
The Poetry of Rilke,
translated by Edward Snow
review by Daniel E. Pritchard
Robert Musil famously asserted that Rilke was "the greatest lyric poet the Germans have seen since the Middle Ages," that he "did nothing but perfect the German poem for the first time." It is hardly an exaggeration. In Rilke’s ouevre, we find some of the most beautiful and moving lyrics of the twentieth century, many of which resonate as if they had been written today.
issue 4 :: November 2009
Collected Poems,
by C.P. Cavafy
review by George Kalogeris
The subjects of his poems often have a provocative glamour to them even
in barest outline: the homoerotic one night stand that is remembered
for a lifetime, the oracular pronouncement unheeded, the talented youth
prone to self destruction, the offhand remark that indicates a crack in
the imperial façade. His language is characterized by chastened
diction, avoidance of overt metaphor (you’re as likely to find one of
those in Cavafy’s work as to encounter a baby), and adjectives that are
usually of the most general sort, emphasizing a flat fidelity to the
facts of experience. [. . .] In his deeply
instructive, excellent introduction to his new translation of Cavafy’s
oeuvre, Daniel Mendelsohn reminds us that Cavafy’s poems are “unmistakably musical,” and that one of the goals of his book is to
restore some of the richness of Cavafy’s linguistic texture through
close attention to prosody, and specifically to matters of diction,
rhyme, and meter.
issue 3 :: September 2009
Chronic, by D.A. Powell
review by Daniel E. Pritchard
The experience of this poem and the book as a whole is of a poet realizing, as if for the first time, the natural world as a subject and finding a place for it in his workshop. Its integration is difficult, confusing; a struggle is captured in this image,
in a protracted stillness, I saw that heron I didn’t wish to disturb
was clearly a white sack caught in the redbud’s limbs
This poet who is ostensibly a product of the identity movement finds, through Virgil, that the natural world is more like us than we’d allow; that deep complications and human connections are possible.
issue 2 :: july 2009 |
