The American Eye
One might be hard-pressed to find a more appropriate diagnosis of the Western world’s current malaise than Hoffman’s Emerson lamenting, on the Sicilian leg of his European journey:
...perhaps it is humanity’s condition
To disown its past, to forget its implications –
The fountain of Aretheuse
Being used as a wash basin.
We live in a culture in which the past, salable only to the nostalgic and the historian, has less value than the Future, for the blank screen of the Future best accomodates the fantasies and projections of the consumer. The American Eye, Eric Hoffman’s sixth collection of poetry, is an act of compassionate remembering. The book is made up of two poems: in "Emerson in Europe" we follow, via poetic recondensations of his journal entries, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s tour of 1833; and in "The Vast Practical Engine," a collage of the ...
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Ballistics: Poems
The dirty little secret about Billy Collins' poetry is it is hilarious. I have always found his poetry amusing, but in person, the poet adds fuel to the flame. If you read Collins' book, Ballistics, this way, you will see what I mean. If one must contemplate ". . .love, death, solitude, youth, and aging" (as the blurb on the dust jacket of this edition states) there are not many ways more pleasurable to do so than through Collins' poetry. He mixes tone and sense of scale in ways that show how poetic experience can be both profound and absurd.
As a book of poetry, Ballistics is both brilliant and amusing. Yes, Collins writes about Greek statuary and Paul Valery, but he does so with the same sensibility as the speaker who loiters in the aisle at the drug store contemplating a purchase or plays "three little piggies." These ...
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Give Over, Graymalkin by Gaylord Brewer
Reading Give Over, Graymalkin, Gaylord Brewer’s eighth collection of poetry, one has the sense of being led into another life. The narrator's voice feels so familiar, that you might suppose that the book was a memoir in verse – and indeed there's little to suggest it's not. Brewer is a deeply personal poet, and in many ways is his own best subject. He speaks frankly and directly to the reader, inviting us into his solitude with a voice that is warm, curious and intelligent.
Organized by geography, the poems in Give Over, Graymalkin, which take the reader from Kenya to India, France and finally to Spain, effectively form a travelogue, and it is to Brewer's credit that nothing in here reads like vacation poems. Despite the well-worn themes (i.e. a wrecked Western soul seeks solace in the charms of the East only to find the holy steps are crowded ...
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One with Others by C.D. Wright
February was Black History Month, a fact that seemed to go largely unnoticed by folks in the news media who I thought might care a little more. A little later, I picked up C.D. Wright’s One with Others, an obvious National Book Award Finalist if nothing else for the promise of greatness based on its author’s resume, a promise solidified by the book itself. I experienced One with Others in the context of two other works of a similar vein: the PBS Freedom Riders documentary and Gregory Orr’s creative nonfiction essay, “Return to Haynesville.” (Five Corners, the Tim Robbins/Jodie Foster film from way back in ’88 also came to mind.) The connection between these pieces is pretty basic: whites taking on the cause of The Civil Rights Movement, as, if not quite their own, something they felt they had to do, penance of a sort for past ill deeds, personal ...
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Full Moon on K Street
Poems about Washington, D.C.
Edited by Kim Roberts
Plan B Press in conjunction with Beltway Poetry Quarterly
One would not have to be out of touch to have a disdain for Washington, D.C. these days: whatever your political stripe, your issue du jour, your favorite target of disdain. But the city and the political capital of the country don’t often meet--they aren't in the same place, particularly for the people who live here and not for the connections, whether it be for the job, the firm, or the corporation back home. This is home for many writers and has been for centuries.
“We live in a Federal District which operates like a colony,” says Kim Roberts in her introduction. And many of the writers in this anthology explore psychological, aesthetic, and political complications of this peculiar geography. There are poems by A.B ...
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Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts
Mapmaking
“We have not solved the problem of love, / have we?” asks Ann Fisher-Wirth in her book-length poem, Carta Marina. Fisher-Wirth, a professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi, spent ten months as a Fulbright professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University where she became fascinated with the literal Carta Marina, a rare fifteenth-century map of Scandinavia housed in the university library, which became the framework for her Carta Marina, a map of the ties that hold people together and pull them apart. A book of unflinching honesty, Carta Marina is an absorbing meditation on love and grief.
Organized chronologically over the course of the 2002-2003 school-year, Carta Marina reads like a novella. The book centers on the reappearance of a lost love. After decades of silence, the man, now a doctor living in Paris, contacts the speaker by email. They begin corresponding, and soon memories of the speaker’s failed pregnancy begin to surface. In two moving, back-to-back poems, “October ...
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Every Riven Thing
Many readers may see Christian Wiman’s new poems only through the lens of death and dying once they know of Wiman’s medical condition: he has a serious blood disease (and he was raised in West Texas, another mortal wound).
Certainly, part of my own reaction (mostly delight) to Wiman’s West Texas poems is affected by having lived nearby the poet’s early stomping grounds. The mesquite, the cotton, the pumpjacks, the open fields and open sky, the dust devils—these are all part of my life now. I was unloading my car in a parking lot not too long ago when a dust devil struck me unaware, and five seconds later the entire car, along with my hair and all my clothing, was filled with ten thousand pieces of straw and as many chunks of dirt and sand.
There are plenty of Texans writing horrible poems about the Lone Star State: the Llano Estacado or the Alamo or personal struggles of herding ...
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Anterooms
Richard Wilbur seems an anomaly in today’s largely postmodern, elliptical, elegiac, multicultural poetical climate. His fidelity to structured form and meter, heavy reliance upon classical antiquity, optimism, and ivy-league background make him something of a throwback to the 1950’s when he first gained public recognition. If his harshest critics are to be warranted in saying that Wilbur did not venture much outside of his formal style and themes, then his new collection Anterooms provides plenty of evidence to lead the way. But why fault Wilbur for refusing the fashionable and sticking with the tried and true, especially when they produce such lovely, musical, and awe-inspiring poems?
Although a very thin volume consisting of less than twenty poems and a few French, Russian, and Latin translations, Anterooms offers powerful evidence of Wilbur’s talents and affirms his place as one of today’s preeminent poets. While the poems here are more ...
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Lovely, Rasberry
The Comedic Effect
A number of poets and critics, including Stephen Burt and Tony Hoagland, have recently sounded the death toll for what Burt has called "elliptical" poetry and Hoagland, "hip contemporary skittishness." Hoagland sees a return to autobiographical narrative of the 1980s, Burt, a renewed interest in the objectivism of Pound and Williams. Yet, while I think (and hope) that the worst of the elliptical poets will fade, others, whose work is less dogmatic, committed primarily to poetry, not "theory," will continue to be published, and rightfully so.
Aaron Belz's second volume of poetry, Lovely, Raspberry (Persea, 2010) is a case in point. While some of Belz's poems exemplify the disconnectedness and the "fronting" of poetic voice that are the touchstones of elliptical poetry, he is no caged pigeon. In the first poem of the volume, Belz writes:
in which I'm typing this, and connect that ...
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The Circus Poems
Adults are inclined to the illusion that all children love clowns and masks and life-sized puppets, but the unknown being inside a funny fuzzy bear costume can sometimes reduce a bemused infant to tears.
In Alex Grant's new work, The Circus Poems, he picks up the theme of Fear of Moving Water and goes on to describe anthropoidal existence in a bewildering universe where even symmetry and order are random. He stresses the fragilility of living forms while showing their tenacious commitment to a beating pulse. We go hurtling through constellations at the mercy of sheer momentum until, worn down to dust, we disappear through a pinprick of light that is birth. Thus the cycle begins again. Of the Human Cannonball, he says:
"He dreams the same dream night after night – he is shooting down a narrowing opening towards a pinprick of light – he hears the muffled voices, clanging metal, the ...
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