On Verse
Chaucer was more than English: he was a great European poet
In 2013, a Prospect magazine profile of the UKIP leader Nigel Farage described the Brexiteer’s party in Chaucerian terms: UKIP is indeed a rag-tag bag … of cussed, contrary, wilful,…
Torn in the sky: on Ilya Kaminsky and Shane McCrae
In Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky connects our current era to a place and time that feels Soviet, although familiar. The book is a narrative with dramatis personae—townspeople, an unborn child,…
Chameleon Poet: The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, by Gillian Cummings
In selecting her manuscript for the 2018 Colorado Prize forPoetry, John Yau praises Gillian Cummings using a phrase from Keats, calling her a “cameleon Poet.” Cummings has written two prize-winning…
What do I know of drowning? On Matt W. Miller’s The Wounded for the Water
Matt W. Miller’s latest collection, The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry, 2018) opens with a preface poem that reads like a lonely sea shanty, a solitary voice singing: “Now…
Can You Call Her Sister? Amelia Rosselli on Sylvia Plath
When the Italian poet Amelia Rosselli took her life 33 years to the day that Sylvia Plath did the same, it was not her only tribute to the American writer,…
In the Beginnings of Emotion Exists an End: on Katy Lederer’s The bright red horse—and the blue—
And since the genesis of the objective body is only a moment in the constitution of the object, the body, by withdrawing from the objective world, will carry with it…
Szymborska as Prophet
There is a stark difference between the universal and the cultural, the true and the rational, and voice and language. In The End and the Beginning, as in her other…
Stealing Liam Rector
When I was a boy a boy when I was boy I thought the language was a language Would send me everywhere there was to go. I thought there was…
Vision as palimpsest: on Johannes Göransson’s translations of Ann Jäderlund
Translations emit. They pull us in and push at us at once. Emit, that curious word: it’s time spelt backward. Translation makes time go backward. Translation’s process … helps me…