Reviews

Blue Atlas is an absorbing and heart-wrenching collection that revolves around the poet’s decision, thirty years back, to have an abortion rather than go full term with an unplanned pregnancy.

Peter Krumbach’s book of prose poems, already adorned with the Antivenom Poetry Award from Denver’s Elixir Press, sits at the axis of two poles—Czechoslovakia and surrealism. Krumbach left Czechoslovakia long ago and has lived in Southern California for 25 years, but he was born in Brno and stayed long enough to earn a degree in Visual Arts.

Neil Shepard’s ninth book of poems, The Book of Failures, follows his collection of selected poems, How It Is, which gathered a quarter century’s worth of his work. After reading that book, I thought I would know what to expect from Shepard, but this new book startles, astonishes, provides the reader with a rare gift:  "a second life / in order to process the first one."

The title of Baron Wormser's eleventh collection evokes the image of an impossible edifice, a building of galactic width and breadth, immense enough to encompass "the housing of infinity," a timeless place of all times and all places in which each room may house either a nation or a single consciousness, an era or a nanosecond, a true story or a fantasist's concoction.

Harry Clifton’s tenth collection of poetry has arrived in time for the poet’s 71st birthday and provides a kind of creative reckoning by the poet with his own “child-self” from the perspective of “old age” (“Neruda,” p. 16). The collection circles back to "a lost maternal ground" after "half a century" of writing, as the book's back cover informs us ...

Carmen Bugan is a Romanian born poet and an academic. In her book of thematic essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, she begins with a poem, followed by this introductory sentence: “To my knowledge, no poet ever changed the course of history, but many dictators did.”

Given the fraught social, political, and cultural climate of the last six years, it would be difficult to think of a more succinct characterization of contemporary America than the title of D. Nurkse's latest book, A Country of Strangers.

I checked inside the back cover of Barry Wallenstein’s latest book, It’s About Time, for a CD in which his voice, mellow for a native New Yorker, might speak these poems to a cool, curvy sax or a pianist hovering above the keys as a jockey bends over a horse....

When poets look to the stars, often they are hoping to place their human worries in a wider context, in search of consolation. But what if they find, instead, that their concerns are reflected somehow in the sky overhead? Think of the famous fragment from Sappho: alone and unhappy, she watches the moon and the Pleiades descend together, like lovers lying down in bed.

Pramila Venkateswaran grew up in Bombay and has lived in the U.S. for the past forty years. She is the author of several collections of poems, including The Singer of Alleppey (2018), Thirtha (2002), Draw Me Inmost (2010), and Trace (2011). Her work explores the lives of women, South Asian imagination, and exile.

Though many poets aspire to literary posterity, their hope for biological longevity can be even less certain. We think of Keats, Plath, Apollinaire, Wheatley, Rimbaud, etc., and wonder what poetic gems they might have written if granted two or three more decades of life.

We would call it a ghost town. Lifta is a village of stone homes on a steep hill outside the gates of Jerusalem, empty of inhabitants since the Nakba. This word is an Arabic term for "catastrophe" or "disaster." It refers to the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 as a result of the conflict following the passage of the UN Partition Plan for Palestine.

John Brehm's pilgrimage began in Nebraska and took him to Brooklyn. There he honed a rather sharp edge which now as he seeks illumination in Portland, Oregon, he sometimes deprecates as an obstacle of compassion for other people.

Jude Nutter’s “Disco Jesus and the Wavering Virgins in Berlin, 2011” is a poem I wanted to read again as soon as I reached the last line. I wanted to see how a poem with such a mundane beginning – the speaker sits in the dark, on a rainy night in Berlin, watching TV evangelists – could accumulate so much imaginative force over the next seven pages.

In her essay "How I write poetry" published at the beginning of 2021 in Poetry Wales, Rosalind Hudis concludes with a reference to Alice Oswald's notion of poetry as "carving from sound."

Bertha Rogers’s new collection, Wild, Again, gathers more than five dozen widely published poems that were written before humanity’s current crisis but now seem deeply relevant to our new way of living. They are daringly and fervently engaged with the natural world – through observation and through active and imaginative participation.

Just over a hundred years ago, Giuseppe Ungaretti upended Italian poetry. With L’Allegria, written, scribbled on scraps, for the most part while he was in the trenches on Italy’s disastrous Isonzo Front—some half million dead and the concluding catastrophe of Caparetto—Ungaretti stripped poetry of all ornament, reducing the physical poetic unit—if there is indeed such a thing—to the single word, the syllable. Geoffrey Brock’s new translation of L’Allegria (1931), published in a bilingual edition by Archipelago Books and very aptly titled Allegria, is as faithful and rewarding as any English rendition of Ungaretti’s work could be.

A francophone Algerian of Maghrebin descent, Samira Negrouche has been widely published in France and in her home country for twenty years, but this new book of translations by poet Marilyn Hacker is the first collection of her poems and prose poems to appear in English. The work in The Olive Trees' Jazz and Other Poems is drawn from three volumes published between 2003 and 2017 and includes the original French texts with parallel English translations.

Judith Wilkinson has assembled and translated a magnificent introduction to the work of the Dutch poet, Hagar Peeters. Born in 1972, Peeters has published at least five volumes of poems, a novel, and other works, but this small anthology is the first of her work to appear in English. The poems are bold, imaginative, and take incisive looks at love, art, family, memory, life, and identity.

Let’s start by saying you can’t do much better as a title than Baldwin’s Catholic Geese, particularly realizing that the geese are in fact geese and not a metaphor. The phrase, the name of a music hall act, appears in a poem about an impresario who wanted to test for rock bottom in theatrical taste…. The poems in Baldwin’s Catholic Geese prompt questions, about the past, its manifestations in the present, and what has changed and what remains essentially the same.

“The Silence” [is] a loving and inventive meditation on the sources of creative inspiration; the vagaries of artistic confidence; and the ability of the mind to keep observing, associating and struggling to build connections, even when those connections unravel, again and again.

In The Photographer at Sixteen Szirtes looks for evidence of hope, for memories, and for a coherent story in countries, languages, and places that feel like half opened doors, allowing only glimpses into his mother's life.

Vacant Possession, Fitzgerald’s fourth collection, is a subtle yet compelling narrative suite in four distinct parts. The narrative arc is implicit, not one of telling, but one of recognition of continuity and connection—between desire and consequence, between morality and hypocrisy, between family and politics, between youthful self and adult self, between understanding and outrage.

My father liked to quote Lin Yutang, a popular sage of the 30’s: “Patriotism is the memory of the good things you had to eat as a child.” In this sense, the Romanian-born poet Carmen Bugan is a patriot, though Lilies from America, her collection of new and selected poems just out from Shearsman, never waves the Romanian flag.