Posts by: Daniel E Pritchard
This is Not a Book Review
Through the tumultuous first decade of the new millennium there has flowed an ever more articulate stream of eulogies for the book review in print. Lamentations for the death of…
Slight Arms ’Round the Cypress Bough
In January, 2010, The Guardian asked former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion, “Why are we all still so hung up on the Romantics?” It may at first seem an odd question: a…
No Room at the End (diptych): Henri Cole
A thirty-foot spider made of stainless steel perches outside of London’s Tate Modern Museum. Artist Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture Maman is grotesque and elegant, vulnerable and out of place on its long…
Diet Verse: John Ashbery’s Planisphere
“Readings” of John Ashbery’s poetry have been a contentious point in critical and scholarly circles for more than half a century. It is commonly held by acolytes and detractors alike…
The Transformation of Roses
It is tempting, as William H. Gass writes in Reading Rilke (Basic Books), to organize Rainer Maria Rilke’s life story around the several themes that obsessed and stalked him, particularly the image…
Ellipses and Trust: Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense
In the preface to this collection of essays and reviews, Stephen Burt describes the “business of critics”: it is “not to assign stars, or to pick winners in poet vs….
The Budding Bucolic D.A. Powell
In the course of just three collections — Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails — D.A. Powell has proven himself to be one of the most exciting and enjoyable American poets writing today. His work is…
Geoffrey Hill: Unparalleled Atonement
I. The recently published edition of Geoffrey Hill’s Selected Poems appears to be an attempt by Yale University Press to atone for Hill’s unpardonable lapse from print on these shores, and I…
Welcome to The Critical Flame
The Irish poet W.B. Yeats, in one of his more revolutionary moods, is purported to have exclaimed, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a…
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