Reviews

Most American readers who encounter this new collection of translations from the Polish will rightly assume that the "New World" of the title refers to the United States, a valid assumption considering that they were largely written during the period that Miłosz, having secured Polish Diplomatic Service posts in New York,  Washington D.C., and later Paris, found himself in a Western culture far different from "the most unhappy land" ("In Warsaw") he left behind in the grim, rubble-strewn aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising….

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.

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.

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.

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.

Though drawing direct parallels between [William Blake’s] the Zoas and each of Desolate Market’s four sections would risk oversimplifying Blake’s shifting, often maddeningly complex mythos, Turner’s poems evoke the fourfold, anagogic phases of being and consciousness familiar to readers of both the Romantic poet and his interpreters, from haunted wasteland, to fallen human world, to enlightened society, to the divine.

…Ever since her debut collection, The Heart of a Deer, Petit has refracted her psychological pain through the prismatic lens of exotic natural imagery—particularly that of the Amazon region: its flora, fauna, and indigenous cultures—channeling her personal traumas into poems that simultaneously captivate and disturb…