THE CRITICAL FLAME

On Verse :: Reviews & Criticism

Christian Wiman's Stolen Air
an essay by James Stotts

So much of the original Russian verse is abandoned. Wiman's default modes seem to be disregard for and bastardization of the original text. If there is even a loose standard for fidelity, then any reader will find hundreds of failures, on every page, in practically every line and phrase.

issue 22 :: November 2012

Christian Wiman's Stolen Air
an essay by Henry Gould

Wiman accomplishes a marvelous thing, a literary exploit combining humility and chutzpah: here, Mandelstam becomes a poet in the American tradition, somehow without ceasing to be a Russian modernist too.

issue 22 :: November 2012

Paul Legault's The Other Poems
a review by Nora Delaney

The Other Poems responds to the question of how to write poetry in the age of the internet. Paul Legualt gives the internet a voice — as much as this is possible. Incorporating the language of email and websites — language not normally considered poetic with a capital P — into his writing, Legault presents it as just another valid linguistic register.

issue 18 :: March 2012

Dean Young's Fall Higher
a review by Wesley Rothman

Fall Higher is a feat of poetic prowess, intense observation, and immersed rumination, but, perhaps most essentially, it is a naked, kinetic love poem to life's vast and tantalizing errors. Young blends the humorous with the dire, the insane with the familiar, and coaxes us to experience our error-ridden lives through the lens of poetry.

issue 18 :: March 2012

Ben Mazer's City of Angels
a review by Mark Thomas Noonan

The challenge for a verse play is to be vigorously two things at once, both poetry and drama. Somewhere, hopefully, the work finds a point where each aspect fuels and reinforces the other. At its most effective moments, Ben Mazer's new verse play achieves this elusive synergy.

issue 15 :: september 2011

Geoffrey Hill's Clavics
a review by Jeffrey Hippolito

Hill is described as one of the most important poets of our age, without having founded a school or even influenced younger writers. He is hermetic in every sense of the word, and those who appreciate his Manichean, prophetic aesthetic will find in Clavics much of value, and many hard locks to pick.

issue 15 :: september 2011

Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa
an essay by Liza Katz

Raymond Roussel is widely read and acclaimed, admired by the likes of Michel Leiris, Marcel Duchamp, and John Ashbery. Questions of aesthetics and ethics become more problematic when reading poets of Roussel’s fame and caliber. How do we weigh the benefits that can be reaped when reading a master of the form against the great damage that can be done through his images that fail to tell the whole truth — about human beings on the whole; about certain groups in particular?

issue 14 :: july 2011

Severance Songs, by Joshua Corey
a review by Nora Delaney

The poems in Severance Songs evoke a romanticized past with their sonnet shapes, but they lurch head first into something less recognizable and more disconcerting, invoking Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.

issue 14 :: july 2011

Trees of the Twentieth Century, by Stephen Sturgeon
a review by James Stotts

More impressive than his mastered shifting tones and multilayered critiques, though, are his images, which are legion and are allowed to stand by themselves (in other words, ‘What does it mean when things / present themselves; it means, it means that we have seen them; that’s over. That’s over.’) His metaphors, more often than not held together in tension like kite string, pair the profane with the sublime.

issue 13 :: May 2011

“Torment,” by Daisy Fried
an essay by Daniel Bosch

At seven pages, ‘Torment’ is longer and more complicated than many American poems published these days. I want you to read it anyway, maybe because this is so. For ‘Torment’ is also clearer and more direct than much of the verse we see in contemporary magazines. It does not induce meaning under the pretense that it has none. The implications of ‘Torment’ follow logically, almost simply, from its words and sentences and verse paragraphs. Though its language is loaded, morally, Fried has distanced her poem from the kind of poem-of-moral-instruction that has been one popular template for American poets working since the 1970s. I hope without expectation that an acute appraisal of ‘Torment’ might lead to a robust questioning of that moral template, and that perhaps we might even set it aside.

issue 13 :: May 2011

Poems, by Ben Mazer
a review by Ailbhe Darcy

By deliberately withholding information it seems, at first blush, to betray the contract between poet and reader. The illusion of lyric is of a soul being bared. In fact, Mazer is here being more honest than most about the trick of lyric, and his illicit overtness (another kind of soul-baring) gives the poem its thrill.

issue 11 :: january 2011

Money Shot, by Rae Armantrout
a review by Daniel E. Pritchard

There is not much prolonged argument in Armantrout, only suggestions of insight that the reader is left to realize: implications by juxtaposition. Those who read poems and wish to paraphrase their contents easily, who desire simple one-to-one lines of logic, will find much of frustration.

issue 11 :: january 2011

Mean Free Path, by Ben Lerner
a review by Daniel E. Pritchard

Mean Free Path is a monumental accomplishment. Lerner has wrenched out of trademark postmodern techniques a poem sequence that is evocative, melancholy, and humane — that last trait redeeming so much that might otherwise feel coldly intellectual or haughty. As with Angle of Yaw, the program here is not a new one, but it is executed to perfection; and, in its high quality, the poems feel as if they break new ground.

issue 9 :: September 2010

All the Whiskey in Heaven, by Charles Bernstein
a review by Tom Lewek

By labeling him, in other words, we negate him. By negating him, in turn, we impose elusive concepts on a body of work that always remains elusive. Bernstein’s corpus contains many poetic avenues (not all of them equally compelling), but it is the intersections of these avenues that reveal the movements from clarity to confusion and from voice to voice that make his poetry too myriad to pigeonhole.

issue 9 :: september 2010

Flowers, by Paul Killebrew
a review by James Stotts

In this political age of Muslim (and various outré) fundamentalisms, ignoring the poetries of disjunction is irresponsible. To deny the beauty of the absurd is always unwise, but right now logics beyond sense form a supercharged locus of critical, humane thought. And it would be wrong to ignore Paul Killebrew.

issue 9 :: september 2010
The Irrationalist, by Suzzanne Buffam
a review by Nora Delaney

How didactic our speaker is! Out of context, one might mistake this snippet for some lecture notes from an introductory class on Aristotle. The prose only accentuates the essayistic tone of the collection: utilitarian, distinctly and emphatically unpoetic. The style itself is paradoxical, almost perverse, since so many of the poems consider inexplicable beauty, awe, and wonder. There is a sharp tension between the iron-tool language of the collection and its anti-utilitarian, anti-rationalist themes. Mysticism trumps reason time and again in these didactic prose poems.

issue 8 :: july 2010

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

Selected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill
review by Daniel E. Pritchard

What will be left, when the reviews and the criticism are nothing but ink-blackened dust, will be the finest body of poetry produced in this age. This selected edition, despite its several omissions and flaws, bears this out. Geoffrey Hill is our great poet, as much as Whitman and Milton were to past generations. Geoffrey Hill is our great poet, as much as Whitman and Milton were to past generations. I make this claim not lightly, and not without overcoming my own suspicious, resistant nature: greatness is a claim too easily bandied about in critical reviews; too often it is claimed lightly that so-and-so is the most accomplished certain species of verse-maker in this particular ever-narrowing timeframe. If one has to erect too many qualifications to argue for greatness, they very likely are not. . . .

issue 1 :: may 2009

The Mower, by Andrew Motion
review by Nora Delaney

Indeed, something boyish remains in Motion’s poems, like the boy skating or boat-stealing in Wordsworth’s “Prelude:” ecstatic, innocent joy in observation and sensation. And clearly this sense is deliberately drawn from Wordsworth — a vestige of Motion’s literary heritage. This childlike wonder is seldom completely naïve, though; Motion’s poems tend to be memento moris, constantly reminding the reader (and Motion himself) of the passing of time, of life’s continual losses, and of the junctures where personal and public histories meet.

issue 1 :: may 2009