Bruce Taylor: The Longest You've Lived Anywhere: New and Selected Poems
Plain-spoken without being plain, with language, simple, but not simpleminded, Bruce Taylor writes in a way that allows the reader, allows you in, invites you to sit down and stay awhile. And what you’ll find in a Taylor poem is at once lovely and important, essential and meaningful.
A Taylor poem is a carefully crafted and beautiful thing, his poetic tools, smoothly used with language that is pure and necessary but with a significance that builds to something evocative. From the poem, “The Window:”
Sometimes at night something weeps
inside him, something sits down
with its head in its hands
and smokes and stares.
And in the poem “Everyday” in which the poet examines cold and rainy mornings, the reader finds that this is a love poem about a woman—gone away—but not gone forever.
The fourth morning she’s gone,
the one before the one she
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Laurie J. MacDiarmid: Consolation Prize
In her debut collection, Laurie MacDiarmid, a Georgetown Review Press prize-winner for 2011, presents readers with narrative and lyrical poems that are compassionate and searing, poems that are filled with truth and tragedy, innocence and experience.
Many first books of poems present a coming-of-age arc, but what sets this collection apart is MacDiarmid’s lovely writing. Her narrator looks at the past with the precision of a journalist, the critical eye of the camera, and the lyricism of a poet. The details of past lives and events are presented in excruciating detail. Like the geologist in the preface poem, MacDiarmid’s narrator studies the past, “burrows in it.” She excavates it, looking for gems, a certain ore—
He studied the ground,
burrowed in it for red, gold and ...
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Alex Grant: The Poems of Wing Lei
In a recent reading Alex Grant gave at Longwood, he said that during the writing of The Poems of Wing Lei, he became Wing Lei. This latest volume of Grant’s is about the life and poetry of ninth century Chinese poet Wing Lei, who lost his beloved wife, Nagini, in a flood. After her death, Wing Lei left his government position and took vows at a monastery, where he lived for seven years before traveling, writing poetry, and living on the charity of strangers. Grant’s voice captures the timeless quality of Chinese poetry, lyrical and rich, precise and evocative.
The opening poem, “Buddha Dream,” speaks to the attempt of the book as a whole to name the unnamable: “Also the white evening, pulling at something you are almost unable to name.” This impulse to capture the elusive and express it in poetry is ...
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Alice Notley: Culture of One
Observing thoughts, as a Buddhist might, does not make art, although it might make a better person. The narrator of Alice Notley’s Culture of One has realized this distinction between art and life. She challenges herself concerning the poetic process underway: “Observe your thoughts: are they a poem? No” (94). Abandoning that reflective lyric project, in the next line via the speaker continues another tactic, a narrative one: “A long time ago something happened that I embody” (94). This is the strategy Notley employs throughout. Some poets try to represent thinking itself –consider Hopkins, Oppen or Williams or Carl Philips – and this Romantic attempt has a beautiful history and potential future. But Notely does something else. Lyric poetry has habituated us to expect drama in poetry via a line break, a caesura, or a metaphorical turn within the arc or content of a singular consciousness. Notley, ...
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Bruce Snider: Paradise Indiana
“Have I reached the end of the world? / Or Indiana?” Bruce Snider asks at the end of the ghazal titled “Map,” the poem which begins his second collection Paradise, Indiana. The questions are an apropos beginning for a collection thus titled because, like the book’s title this poem and these questions work double duty (a theme throughout this review and one of the aspects of Snider’s work I most admire). On the one hand the questions announce the collection’s spatial situation (all of these poems do deal with or are placed in Indiana), but on the other hand “Map’s” end suggests the emotional landscape this collection associates with that state. The questions are a situating arrival of sorts because the poem begins in statement and ends in this doubled place, an Indiana that is both a mysterious lost state in the American imagination and a mysterious ...
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James Longenback: The Iron Key
James Longenbach’s collection of poetry, The Iron Key, follows two previous collections, Threshold and Fleet River. Of Fleet River, I am most familiar. That being said, while I have studied literary criticism with the poet, I have not studied the writing of poetry with him, though I have read his work and heard him read, certainly. In that light, this review will examine the book, The Iron Key, in a way that might be familiar. To show part of what I have learned from my teacher, I will briefly examine three poems from the collection. These would be the opening poem, the titular poem, and the final poem. Since this is a review, I will reach no particular conclusion here, but instead suggest that this book is the work of a mature poet who seems concerned with processes of memory and forgetting.
The opening poem, “Knowledge,” ...
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Kaia Sand: interval
Political poems tend to sag under the weight of their agendas. The poet's sense of outrage filters in, burdening the poem with didacticism, or the poet finds himself speaking on behalf of a group—Haitian refugees or spotted owls, for instance—and poems, compact by nature, don't work when struggling beneath a multitude of voices. Yet many poets have written successful political poems, not least of all Carolyn Forché, who in "The Colonel" avoids the pitfalls of the genre by giving readers a straightforward, almost journalistic, account of the speaker's encounter with a Central American dictator: a quotidian dinner, then the startling final image of the severed ears.
Kaia Sand, in the acknowledgments for interval (her debut book of poems) credits Forché, and clearly she, like her predecessor, has learned to sidestep the land mines associated with writing politically charged poetry. Partly Sand accomplishes this through the style and structure of ...
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William Wright: Night Field Anecdote
William Wright’s other recent release, Bledsoe, is an extended narrative focused on a single family, while Night Field Anecdote exists in a wider breadth of place and experience. The latter collection does contain “Bledsoe,” the original version of the poem that was expanded into the other full book, but Night Field Anecdote stretches beyond the fringes of Appalachia. Wright’s lexicon begins in tactile touches of the pastoral, yet ends in a nightmarish collage of animal and human violence.
Wright’s world is near that of Irene McKinney’s debut collection from 1976, The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap, although his approach is quite different. McKinney’s content shifted after that first book: She left behind her dark pastoral roots as a place of childhood. Wright’s book feels more adult and heavy, a world where nature’s dynamics do not simply recede into the background of memory and dream. This is a ...
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Buried in the Mind's Backyard (James review)
W.M. Rivera is a poet with a distinctive relationship to his own unconscious mind and the memories housed there. His stunning new collection of poems, Buried in the Mind’s Backyard, documents the poet’s unique and often painful connection to his psyche. In Part I the poet elevates the unconscious mind to the level of the familiar without resorting to surrealism as he unearths childhood memories of his great grandmother, grandmother, and mother. In “Off to No Ends” he establishes a pattern of excavating forgotten or repressed memory by using concrete imagery as he speaks of his great grandmother, “her mind/a package when the gift is gone.” He then solidifies the template of literary excavation as he assumes the role of unwilling visionary in the title poem, “Buried in the Mind’s Backyard.” Here he explores the excruciating and until recently buried memory of his mother’s attempted suicide during his childhood. The ...
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Buried in the Mind's Backyard (Schwartz review)
It seems to me one useful polarity by which to sort poets might run from "realistic" to "idealistic." In other words, some poets spend most of their time describing clearly and relatively completely what's in front of them while others want to ascend to the empyrean as quickly as possible. There are advantages and dangers for both. The realist speaks swiftly and directly, but gets drowned in the objects he conjures up. The poem never goes beyond its details. The idealist can fill the reader's mind with cosmic thoughts but not always with thoughts tethered to real experience. We wind up in a sentimental utopia. Of course, most poets lie somewhere in between.
I think this also relates to the question "what do we really know?" I'm Romantic and, indeed, Victorian enough to value really good advice in the lines of a poem that shows me how I might ...
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