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Last November we were pleased to note that Randall Couch was the recipient of Corneliu M Popescu Prize for Poetry Translation for his translation from the Spanish of Mad Women by Chilean Gabriela Mistral. The award—named after the translator of the work of one of Romania's leading poets—highlights the important, but unfortunately relatively scarce, contributions of literature in translation to the English speaking world. The award was announced by judges Elaine Feinstein and Stephen Romer on Thursday, 19 November 2009 in an event at London's Romanian cultural center, the Ratiu Foundation, which has recently posted some photographs of the event on their website. For more on the award navigate to http://www.romanianculturalcentre.org.uk/.

About Madwomen:

A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral's most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning.

From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting "madwomen" who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral's poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral's final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated "madwoman" than most have ever known.

Archived in Awards | Poetry
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The Tribune's Julia Keller recently penned an article about a man who knows the city "like the back of his hand,"—and is one of its most prominent writers—Reginald Gibbons, whose evocative collection of writing about our fair city in Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories comes out April 2010.

Though a native of Houston, Gibbons' new collection reveals that his muse is clearly the city of Chicago, where he has lived and taught for many years as a professor of English at Northwestern University. As Keller writes:

It was coming to Chicago—a place in which, to Gibbons' eye, the past and present commingle in rackety yet luminous profusion—that truly set fire to his imagination, he says. "I got such a powerful feeling in Chicago, a feeling I've never gotten in New York—the historical echo of the spaces downtown, the feeling that everyone who has ever worked here is still here. There's a profoundly good feeling of being connected with the generations."

And in Slow Trains Overhead Gibbons combines this connection to the city of Chicago with his inimitable command of language to capture what it's really like to live in this remarkable city. Embracing a striking variety of human experience—a chance encounter with a veteran on Belmont Avenue, the grimy majesty of the downtown El tracks, domestic violence in a North Side brownstone, the wide-eyed wonder of new arrivals at O'Hare, and much more—these new and selected poems and stories by Reginald Gibbons celebrate the heady mix of elation and despair that is city life. With Slow Trains Overhead, he has rendered a living portrait of Chicago as luminously detailed and powerful as those of Nelson Algren and Carl Sandburg.

Read more about Reginald Gibbons on the Tribune website.

Archived in Chicago | Poetry | Reviews
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In July, the Press published At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, the first book-length study of this major poet. For the book, editor Joshua Weiner gathered together an all-star cast of contributors—including Eavan Boland, David Gewanter, Wendy Lesser, Paul Muldoon, John Peck, Robert Pinsky, and Tom Sleigh&mdash to survey Gunn's career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre.

Now the University of Maryland Library has launched a new digital exhibit, "'Well, I wanted a new vision…': Thom Gunn and 'Misanthropos,'" to celebrate the book's publication. In crafting his essays for the collection, Weiner relied heavily on Maryland's collection of Gunn's papers. My making these materials available, the library offers a rare glimpse into the process of research.

Archived in Books for the News | Poetry
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In Watch, Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in Watch sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes—all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller’s poems celebrate communities both invented and real.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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An Algebra is an interwoven collection of eight sequences and sixteen individual poems, where images and phrases recur in new contexts, connecting and suspending thoughts, emotions and insights. By turns, the poems leap from the public realm of urban decay and outsourcing to the intimacies of family life, from a street mime to a haunting dream, from elegy to lyric evocation. Wholeness and brokenness intertwine in the book; glimpsed patterns and startling disjunctions drive its explorations.

An Algebra is a work of changing equivalents, a search for balance in a world of transformation and loss. It is a brilliantly constructed, moving book by a poet who has achieved a new level of imaginative expression and skill.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Bright Star, the new film written and directed by Jane Campion, opened in the Chicago area yesterday. Bright Star weaves a story of the romantic love and poetic longing of John Keats and Fanny Brawne during the last three years of Keats' too-short life. Campion's script was, according to today's review in the Chicago Tribune, "inspired by the exceptional Andrew Motion biography Keats," which we published in paperback in 1999.

Motion's biography is an interesting choice for a filmmaker. Andrew Motion is a poet above all; he served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. He has numerous books of poetry to his credit, as well as criticism and several other biographies. Keats is a poet's biography of a poet; it is steeped in the words of the poet, shaped primarily by Keats' letters and punctuated by Keats' poems. It is as textual as you can get.

Keats has come down to us, Motion writes, as a poets' poet: the champion of truth and beauty, a sensualist, the archetype of the Romantic poet, who poured out words in a frenetic rush, writing all the poems we know him for in the space of a month or two. But Motion gives us another side of John Keats. Unlike previous biographers, he pays close attention to the social and political worlds Keats inhabited—a young man, trying to climb up from his working class origins, shaped by radical political ideas as well as by notions of truth, beauty, and romantic love.

We have an excerpt from the book which discusses Keats, Fanny Brawne, and Keats' poem to her, "Bright Star."

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Literature | Poetry
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For an excellent review of Randall Mann's newest book of poems, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, check out Miguel Murphy's piece in the current edition of Rain Taxi. Drawing from the work of it's titular namesake, Mann's new book grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, yet unforgiving, gay subculture that recalls the San Francisco Bay of the 1960's Gunn knew so well. And judging by Murphy's review, from its "metrical clarity" to its candid subject matter, Mann's work is indeed the well deserving inheritor of Gunn's poetic legacy.

Murphy writes for Rain Taxi:

This is the landscape of the beautiful—the transgressive, the godless, the gay—who, "tired / of the age of irony, everything / a gesture" must navigate the dangers of drugs, disease, and love…

Here, a generation post-Gunn, Mann exerts a similar difficult clarity about so-called "underworld" desires. He is not afraid to address the taboo with a frankness made palatable by strict metrical song.

Pick up a copy of Rain Taxi to read the full review or pick up a copy of Breakfast with Thom Gunn on the Press website.

Also see At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn—the first book-length study of Gunn's work bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre, edited by Joshua Weiner.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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We're used to seeing, usually in the New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee's frequent book reviews. And we have first-hand experience (pdf) of what a great job the Notices of the American Mathematical Society does with its book reviews section.

Still, it was a surprise to learn from the complete review that these two reliable patterns of the book reviewing world had combined in such an unexpected way. But perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising at all, because the book Coetzee reviews in the new issue of Notices (pdf) is all about a similar sort of well suited yet not wholly expected pair. About Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, Coetzee opines that "there are a priori grounds for thinking of poetry and mathematics together, as two rarefied forms of symbolic activity based on the power of the human mind to detect hidden analogies. In other words, an anthology like Strange Attractors, which brings together a hundred and fifty poems with some degree of mathematical content, makes more a priori sense than, say, a collection of famous speeches with some mathematical content."

Well worth reading for reasons beyond its novelty, the review (along with the small matter of that Nobel-winning oeuvre) reminds us for the nth time what a coup it is to have published books both by and about such a brilliant writer.

Archived in Books for the News | Literature | Poetry
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Maverick gay icon of poetry Thom Gunn (1929—2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments to either claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and United States alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms. Along the way, Gunn’s verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture.

The first book-length collection of essays on this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic—and how his influence has only grown since his death.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Just a quick post to point you towards Slate magazines' weekly poem, which is currently featuring Peg Boyers, author of Hard Bread and more recently Honey with Tobacco, reading her poem "The Fate of Pleasure."

Each week Slate's poetry editor Robert Pinsky chooses a poem to be featured on their site and added to the audio archive at Slate's Poetry Podcast. So in the spirit of full disclosure it should also be mentioned that Pinsky has recently released a new book with the Press as well: Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town. Though not a poetry book Thousands of Broadways does offer up some of the fascinating literary insights of its author as he examines the history and character of America's small towns, including reflections on his own time growing up in one.

Find out more about Pinsky's new book and Boyer's poetry on the press's website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
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Randall Mann’s Breakfast with Thom Gunn is a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is “pitiless,” the trees “thin and bloodless,” the words “like the icy water” of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the “graceful erosion” of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, unforgiving subculture. Breakfast with Thom Gunn is at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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In his second collection of poems, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about the urge “to carve a space” for love and family from out of the vast sweep of modern life. Coursing between the political and personal with astonishing ease, Campion writes at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara, then in the next, of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree, representing his impulse to escape the culture altogether. He moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. In The Lions, Campion achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves him to be one of the very best poets of his generation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century, from Cotton Mather and a nineteenth-century minstrel boy to B-movie actress Barbara Payton, a female Elvis impersonator, and even Paris Hilton, Polito tracks the stars, rituals, snares, hijinks, and mysteries at the crossroads of American spiritual and media life across a diversity of styles, tones, and eras. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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With Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Inferno, Guy P. Raffa decoded Dante's epic poem for a new generation of readers. And with the forthcoming The Complete Danteworlds: A Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy Raffa has expanded his project to encompass the entire text, through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—and into cyberspace. As the New Yorker's Vicky Raab notes in a recent article, Raffa's online version of Danteworlds offers "an integrated multimedia journey" through Dante's Divine Comedy, perfectly marrying medium with message to launch the reader "right into the allegorical action, heightening rather than dulling appreciation and comprehension." Raab continues:

Canto by canto, as Virgil and then Beatrice lead the benighted Dante through "circles of Hell, terraces of Purgatory, spheres of Paradise," so the clear-eyed Guy P. Raffa, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin who conceived and developed the site, leads students in Dante's steps, urging them to click on regions within each realm. I go straight to Circle Nine, of course, the lowest depths of the Inferno, peopled by the grisliest creatures: the giants Nimrod, Ephialtes, and Antaeus, the cannibalistic Ugolino, who eats the back of Ruggiero's head, "so that one head to the other was a hat," and, of course, the supersized, winged, tri-colored Beelzebub.

Continue reading Raab's article on the New Yorker website, or navigate to http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/ and check out the cyber version of Danteworlds for yourself.

Archived in Literature | Medieval and Renaissance | Poetry | Reviews
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In early December, the Village Voice asked a panel of literary heavyweights (Ethan Hawke notwithstanding) to opine on their favorite obscure book. Robert Pinsky's selection was a book called Caelica from "the greatest poet unknown to many readers," Fulke Greville. In addition to being, as Pinsky notes, "an upper-class Englishman with a funny name," (or, in your correspondent's humble opinion, a moniker ripe for filching by a newly-formed indie rock band) Greville (1554–1628) was an important member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics.

Pinsky, who, in addition to his many and varied achievements, including a stint as United States poet laureate and a cameo on The Simpsons, is a University of Chicago Press author (his Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town will be published this Spring), will undoubtedly be delighted to know Greville may find his elusive audience at last. In April, the Press will publish in paperback The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited and with an introduction by Thom Gunn and a new afterword by Bradin Cormack, which includes the whole of the lyric sequence, Caelica. Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Gunn's selection of Greville's short poems, along with choruses from some of Greville's verse dramas, and his thoughtful introduction to the poet is an event of the first order that is certain to rescue Greville from the ranks of the obscure.

There's more Gunn on our spring list, as well. At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, edited by Joshua Weiner, brings together essays (including one from Pinsky) that explore Gunn's pressure on the boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic, in both his life and his work. And in our Phoenix Poets, Randall Mann imagines Breakfast with Thom Gunn.

Whether you are seeking an overlooked sixteenth century bard or a twentieth-century gay literary icon, our Spring list will satisfy all.

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Poetry
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Poet-critic Dan Chiasson, author of the verse collection The Afterlife of Objects and One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, a book of criticism, will join the Paris Review as a poetry editor. Congratulations to Dan on his new post!

Celebrate by reading a poem from The Afterlife of Objects.

Archived in Books for the News | Poetry
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Los Angeles Times book review editor David L. Ulin has written an approving review of Colette Labouff Atkinson's new book of poems, Mean, for last Sunday's edition of the paper. Remarking on what Ulin calls the "exquisite tension" between intimacy and distance in Labouff's work Ulin writes:

[The] 43 vignettes [in Mean] add up to an emotional autobiography. In the title piece, Atkinson describes her husband's former wife, a stripper. "He traded her in for me," she writes. "To people I don't know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me."

The irony is that we are people she doesn't know, but this is part of the book's exquisite tension. Again and again, Atkinson reveals intimacies in an offhand way. "Gain" describes her great-uncle, a columnist for the ILWU Warehouse News, who "[b]etween the lines, be wise—organize—"composes a fairy tale about a pony made of gold. "For God's Sake, Get Out" recalls "The Amityville Horror," then morphs into a meditation on how houses can be haunted by disappointment and loss.

Read the review on the LA Times website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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In the appropriately titled Mean, Colette LaBouff Atkinson's speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged ex-husbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn't leave you alone. Managing to "say" what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everyday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, Mean lays bare the darkness within the narrator's heart as well as in ours.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Speaking last week at an event celebrating the anthology Best American Poetry 2008, UCP poet Charles Bernstein proclaimed his staunch support for a poetry bailout aimed at restoring readers' confidence.

"As you know," Bernstein argued, "the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry." Gawker was inspired by this impassioned address to ponder "whether this liquidity crunch has begotten too many issuances of new metaphors."

And we've got more where that came from: Bernstein's polemic against National Poetry Month is just as inspiring.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry
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At a ceremony this Monday at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, John Dent-Young was awarded the Premio Valle Inclán by TLS editor Sir Peter Stothard for his recent English language translation of the works of Spanish poet Luis de Góngorra in Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora: A Bilingual Edition. In an article published yesterday acknowledging the award, the TLS's Adrian Tahourdin writes:

Góngora (1561–1627) is "considered by many to be Spain's greatest poet," according to Dent-Young, whose aim in this volume was "to rescue Góngora from his role as textbook example of the Baroque and give him a human voice," while suggesting that Velázquez's severe portrait of the poet (reproduced here) belies his true nature: "That bridge of yours, Manzanares, it's a laugh; / listen to what the people round here say: / it's a bridge that ought to span a mighty sea, / and you're not river enough to merit half" (from "The Bridge of Segovia"). Reviewing Dent-Young's work in the TLS of October 19, 2007, Chris Andrews wrote, "Góngora's verse affords a range of pleasures … but bringing those together requires patience, good will and philological help. John Dent-Young has provided the smoothest possible access to the poems.… The translations are inventive and unstuffy, sensitive and bold, a pleasure to read on their own."

Read the article on the TLS website, or find out more about the book.

Archived in Awards | Poetry
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Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. Madwomen: The “Locas mujeres” Poems of Gabriela Mistral is the first appearance in English of all twenty-six poems of the “Locas mujeres” series, including those left unpublished at her death.

Randall Couch edited and translated Madwomen and he recently gave a reading of seven poems from the book (together with a reading of the Spanish texts) at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. The complete one-hour reading can be downloaded from the Writers House site.

Archived in Author Events | Poetry
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Marilyn Hacker, award winning poet and translator of over twelve books of contemporary French poetry including Guy Goffette's recent Charlestown Blues: Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition, has posted a piece on the art of translation to the recently launched Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux poetry blog this week.

In her post she discusses her intimate engagement with the works she translates and her constant struggle to remain true to the original. Hacker writes: "The translator must be faithful to the text's linguistic valence, its connotations, to its music as well as its meaning." And perhaps nowhere else does the translator develop this synergy between sound and sense than in Georgetown Blues where her selection of Geoffette's work all center around the notion of "blue"—the color and the emotion, as well as that quintessentially American style of musical performance. From Charlestown Blues:

Read another poem on the UCP website or see Marilyn Hacker On "The Most Engaged Form Of Reading" on the FSG poetry blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Shelf, a literary blog associated with the Canadian magazine The Walrus has just posted an interview with Elise Partridge discussing her new book of poems, Chameleon Hours. Partridge, who splits her time between Vancouver, BC, and Washington State, talks with Jared Bland about the reception of her work in the U.S. and, alternatively, how she sees it fitting into a Canadian literary tradition:

Much of your work has been published in the States, including in the New Yorker, and this new book is being simultaneously issued by the University of Chicago Press. In other words, you have more southern exposure than many Canadian poets. Does this effect the way in which you see your work fitting into a Canadian poetic tradition? Not to force you into any immodest comparisons, but what strain of poetic thought do you see your work coming out of?

I think writers inevitably belong in some way to their native countries and languages, but are also often hybrids of their own making, based on their sensibilities, influences, and so on. As an English-speaking North American (a dual citizen of Canada and the United States) I've been influenced by all kinds of literature in English—British, American, Irish, Australian, Canadian—and by literature translated into English, especially Polish, Russian, German, Latin American, and Chinese.…

And as to what Canadian tradition I might fit into—if I can place myself among living poets here, I do feel a bond with many, some older than I am and perhaps even more in the rising generations. I would certainly like to see Canadian poetry get more "southern exposure." I think there is a great deal that could both inspire and invigorate American poetry, and many more readers in the US who might simply enjoy and learn from Canadian poetry.

Read the rest of the interview on The Shelf.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
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Haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire, Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whether writing poems about North American life and landscape; or love poems; or elegies for family and friends; or poems on serious, debilitating illness and the transformations it can effect—Elise Partridge offers in Chameleon Hours words forged by suffering and courage. Full of wit and empathy, Partridge’s poems draw inspiration from sources as whimsical as tortoises and pontoons, as poignant as a homeless woman taking shelter inside a post office on a winter night, and as deeply personal as her own cancer diagnosis at a young age. Chameleon Hours is a book about the rewards of being reminded of one’s own mortality and the lyric expression of life in all its intensity.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blessings for the Hands follows various speakers—often disabled speakers, who never once figure themselves as objects of complaint or self-pity—through the haunted dreamscape of “normalcy.” Indeed, dreams are continuous presences in this unusually subtle and elegant debut collection that juxtaposes physical circumstances with the vast interior life of the imagination. The subjects of Blessings for the Hands are real and imagined confrontations—and reconciliations—between family members, friends, strangers, and animals.

Matthew Schwartz’s quasi-autobiographical verse complicates and clarifies the emotions waiting just underneath the patterns and expectations of the speakers’ daylight lives, where anger, joy, corporeality, and mortality all seem to collide. For Schwartz, poetry is a sleight of hand that keeps the reader guessing through nearly imperceptible shifts between present vision and absent reality. Blessings for the Hands is a lyric reckoning of the tension between the life we are given and the life we are determined to lead.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Vicki Hearne's (1946-2001) posthumously published Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems has received a positive review in this month's issue of Poetry magazine by critic Joel Brouwer. Praising her work for transforming her practical knowledge of the dogs and horses she trained into a unique philosophical exploration of "language and the mind," Brouwer writes:

Nearly all of Hearne's writing, regardless of genre or audience, drew upon her work as a professional horse and dog trainer. But to think of this poet in those terms alone would be as misguided as thinking of E.O. Wilson as an entomologist. Communicating with animals helped Hearne to think through a variety of philosophical concerns, particularly questions of representation. What stories do we tell ourselves about our relationships with the animals we live and work with, feed and eat, love and fear? What really happens, and what do we imagine happens, when two species with fundamentally differing consciousnesses and languages—people and dogs, say—attempt to communicate? Above all, how might our investigation of such questions lead us to more general insights about representation and reality?

The review concludes: "Hearne's verse is … rigorously intelligent, rhetorically supple, wholly unafraid of complexity, formally deft, and, … liable to begin to glow with tricks of light."

Read the review on the Poetry magazine website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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This month's Boston Review is running a nice piece on Liam Rector's The Executive Director of the Fallen World—the last book of poetry Rector would publish before taking his own life in late August of 2007 after battling both colon cancer and heart disease. But as reviewer Robert Schnall notes, though the poet may be gone, his poetry continues to have a profound effect upon its readers with its "hard-won insight and incandescent gallows humor… intermixing pathos with practical wisdom, tragedy with relentless sass." The review continues:

Often his mordant irony and slang diction prove to be his best defenses against despair, as in "So We'll Go No More," which presents a dying speaker's valediction to his lover: "Cancer, heart attack, bypass—all // In the same year? My chances / Are 20%! And I'm f—g well / Ready, ready to go." For Rector's speakers, the past is a looming presence. "Now" presents a tender, comic, and ultimately beautiful overview of life as a lesson in disheartenment from early childhood to death, while "First Marriage," "Beautiful, Sane Women," and "Our Last Period Together" all document failed relationships with a humor so delicate that it can barely conceal the vulnerability it seeks to disguise.

Read the rest of the review on the Boston Review website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Pinsky's "Poet's Choice" column in Last Sunday's Washington Post featured a nice review of Elise Partridge's new book of poems, Chameleon Hours. Pinsky's column quotes several of Partridge's poems and praises her unique vision that allows her to transform even her darkest hours into cause for linguistic celebration. Pinsky writes:

Some readers will recognize Partridge's name and recall her poems about cancer treatment that appeared in the New Yorker in recent years, including "Chemo Side Effects: Vision." That poem, collected in this book, begins by saying how printed words "fizzle" as "gnats in dervish clouds." Those phrases about temporarily impaired vision have so much energy that the feeling is almost gleeful, as if to say that even this deterioration can occasion the thrill of language. The same poem contains the lines:

Eyes that have brought me so many words,

are you too dim for the world to keep courting?

Days, lay out your wares in the honking bazaar!

The "wares" of daily, physical experience are humdrum and desired, gaudy and precious. What an ironic word "dim" is for the sharp, bright way this poet sees. In their ample, embracing, nuanced appetite for sensory experience, her poems achieve an ardent, compassionate and unsentimental vision.

Read the rest of "Poet's Choice" including another poem, "In the Barn," on the Washington Post website.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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Another review from the Times Literary Supplement: in the January 4 edition Peter Hainsworth takes on two recent translations of twentieth century Italian poetry, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto and The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni—both are the first substantial translations of these masters of Italian poetry for English speaking audiences.

In the review Hainsworth delivers an enthusiastic appraisal of the two works:

Sereni and Zanzotto … embraced negatives and contradictions more wholeheartedly and more energetically than … the poets of the previous generation.… The result in both cases is a particularly adventurous and exciting body of work, constantly in evolution, sometimes (especially in the case of Zanzotto) on the edge of flamboyant avant-gardism, but somehow generally able to keep its poetic balance. What also gives both poets and others of their generation substance is the fact that they have something to say. Sereni's mature poetry is constantly probing issues of commitment, choice and understanding, often through a multiplicity of voices, criss-crossing and overlaying each other, with back references to his favorite poets or his own previous work.… They represent and enact the often dramatic confrontation of differing, often irreconcilable viewpoints and constantly changing perspectives.

Zanzotto's dizzying changes of tack and tone between nonsense, parody, and high literariness are similarly rooted in the sense of things being impossible to pin down in words, but take on concrete urgency through being clustered around a host of contemporary issues (ranging from war and environmental degradation to school teaching and lunar exploration).

Find out more about the work of these two remarkable poets on the UCP website:

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni: A Bilingual Edition

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
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The late Liam Rector, who's most recent book of poetry, The Executive Director of the Fallen World was published last fall by the press, was eulogized by one of his friends and colleagues David Gates in Newsweek's online edition this Monday. Gates' piece begins:

The book I treasure most is a copy of Liam Rector's last collection of poems, (The Executive Director of the Fallen World) which he handed to me a year ago at Café Loup in the West Village, inscribed, in his firm, rounded print, "For David—the most splendid hipster I've ever known—long may you run." It was the best compliment I'll ever get (long may I run), even though Liam, as he so often did, was really talking obliquely about himself.…

As well as providing insights into this talented poet's life, Gates' article also reprints several excerpts of Mr. Rector's work including "The Remarkable Objectivity of Your Old Friends," and "So We'll Go No More." Read the full article on the Newsweek website.

Archived in Books for the News | Poetry
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A review in the September 12 New York Sun focuses on author Vicki Hearne's (1946–2001) double life as an assistant professor of English at Yale and a "respected horse and dog trainer;" two worlds which Hearne brings together in an unusual and fascinating way with her newest work, posthumously published by the press, Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Louisa Thomas writes for the Sun:

Vicki Hearne was taken seriously in both the academy and in the kennels where she spent much of her time. But she was not wholly at home in either. As she wrote in her book Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name, "Dog trainers and philosophers can't make much sense of each other." The trainers talk about animals in anthropomorphized language, whereas philosophers tend to assume that only humans are truly moral creatures. Ms. Hearne spent much of her time trying to bridge the gap—to build off of what the philosophers say about consciousness and the trickeries of language, while vigorously defending the idea that animals are in on the game.

This is the task of her poetry as well as her prose. Ms. Hearne is less well known as a poet, but she is a skilled practitioner, and her subject is well-suited to verse. Her talent is plainly clear in her posthumous collection of new and selected poems, Tricks of the Light … edited by her longtime friend and champion, the critic and poet John Hollander.

Read the rest of the review on the New York Sun website.

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Reviews
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Vicki Hearne, best known and celebrated today as a writer of strikingly original poetry and prose, was a skillful dog and horse trainer, and sometimes controversial animal advocate. Before her untimely death in 2001, she entrusted her last manuscript to distinguished poet, scholar, and long-time friend John Hollander. This manuscript became Tricks of the Light, the definitive Vicki Hearne collection that spans the entirety of her illustrious career, from the 1980 publication of her first book to never-before-published poems composed on her deathbed.

These poignant meditations on life and death possess a rare combination of philosophical speculation, boundary-shattering lyricism, and an unusually elegant style that became Hearne's trademark. Tricks of the Light—acute, vibrant, and deeply informed—is a sensuous reckoning of the connection between humans and the natural world.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Poetry Daily—a website dedicated to the dissemination of contemporary poetry through news, reviews, and excerpts—has published the introduction as well as several excellent poems from Vicki Hearne's (1946-2001) new book, Tricks of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Written by John Hollander, the introduction delivers some fascinating insights into some of the new material, published posthumously, in this latest work. Hollander writes:

The thirty-six posthumous poems (including the long, shockingly original five-part title sequence, Tricks of the Light) explore some of her previously traveled terrain, but with a greater concern for its edges and deceptive contours. The weather, the activity of painting and sculpting, arguments with Plato, a continuing discourse with and of dogs, and always in these poems the array of different kinds of light—different figurations of it, but all somehow heading toward governing tropes of consciousness itself and, ultimately, language. This can be seen even in some of the more casually beautiful short poems like "White Out," "Getting It Right," and "Every Time the Mountain," and in parts of the long poem itself. Running to something like 360 lines in five numbered sections, the sequence starts out with the image of a young girl "hot with light" riding a stallion (returned to briefly later on in the poem) and subsequently moves through its heavily enjambed free-verse tercets with an almost Pindaric profusion of images in complex periodic sentences that, in the course of the poem, seem to be representing rhythms of thought rather than that of archaic eloquence …

You can read the rest of Hollander's introduction detailing Hearne's life and career, and peppered with examples of her writing, on the Poetry Daily website. Don't forget to check out the selection of Hearne's work they've posted as well.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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The New York Times brought the sad news this morning that Liam Rector, distinguished poet and educator, committed suicide on Wednesday morning at his home in Greenwich Village at the age of 57. According to his bio posted at Poets.org, Rector "was born in Washington, D.C., in 1949. He received an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard."

"Rector taught at Columbia University, The New School, Emerson College, George Mason University, and elsewhere. He founded and directed the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College, and administered literary programs at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets."

"His books of poems include The Executive Director of the Fallen World, American Prodigal and The Sorrow of Architecture. His work has also appeared in a variety of distinguished literary publications including Agni, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Ploughshares."

His contributions to the literary community will be sorely missed.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry
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Prolific literary blogger Marshall Zeringue recently devoted several postings to two fresh voices in Chicago's Phoenix Poets Series: Peter Campion, author of Other People, and Peg Boyers, author of the recently published Honey with Tobacco.

On his blog Writers Read Zeringue invites Campion to discuss some of the books he's currently reading, offering a great chance to listen in on the literary insights of a pro. Zeringue also takes the time to link to Campion's work in Slate magazine where Campion has been reprinted as well as made audio recordings of several of his poems from Other People.

Zeringue also features Peg Boyers discussing her recent book, Honey with Tobacco, on The Page 69 Test—another blog authored and administrated by Zeringue in which he asks an author to quote and briefly discuss whatever text can be found on page 69 of their book (though he does bend the rules a bit for Boyers, whose book weighs in at a short but sweet 64 pages).

You can find out more about Other People and Honey with Tobacco as well as read more excerpts on the UCP website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
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Robert Pinsky recently featured Peg Boyers' latest book of poems Honey with Tobacco in his "Poet's Choice" column in the Washington Post. Pinsky writes:

Cuban life before Castro has supplied American poetry with rich, ambiguous material. An engaging, poignant group of poems in Peg Boyers's new book, Honey with Tobacco, includes childhood memories of that time. Boyers declines mere nostalgia, as in this poem that scrutinizes pleasure-seeking, a leisured class, even memory itself, with a cool attention, analytical as well as sympathetic.…

PLAYA COLORADA

It was a beach
like all beaches, only perhaps more beautiful.
And the sand was pink not red.
We would arrive in caravans,
hampers overflowing with food and drink
like Aziz and his party on the way to Malabar.
The colonials and their servants away on an outing.
We would stop under thatch umbrellas,
towels and tablecloths spread out against the sea.
My mother in her skirted swim suit
surrounded by fathers of other children,
her olive skin lit through her straw hat.
They would laugh and drink beer
and leer
while the children did the usual beach things,
boring futile tunnels to China, running
at waves and then away,
daring each other to be swallowed.
I would go out by the forbidden rocks and pick off oysters,
then give them to the men to pry open,
cover with lime juice and suck dry.
Once, I saw my mother sucking
an oyster out of another daddy's hand.
Her dappled face bobbed and smiled and her tongue
searched the shell for pearls.

Update: Marshal Zeringue also graciously noted Boyers's new book on his blog newreads.blogspot.com.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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Making the poet available to contemporary readers of poetry without denying him his historical context, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora represents Góngora as master of many genres and a writer whose life and poetry are closely intertwined. John Dent-Young’s free translations capture Góngora’s intensely musical voice and transmit the individuality and self-assuredness of the poet. The first significant edition of this seminal and challenging poet in many years, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora puts the Spanish master in his rightful place alongside other masters of the difficult, such as John Donne and Stéphane Mallarmé.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Publishers Weekly recently ran a positive review of James Longenbach's most recent collection of poems Draft of a Letter. Praising one of the central themes of the work the PW reviewer writes:

This third book by noted critic and poet Longenbach is a collection of lyrics presenting conversations between an eternal soul and that soul's embodied, temporal self. When this idiosyncratic fragmentation of "the mind thinking" works, the results are lovely, intimate and distilled, as in the title poem, when the soul informs us, "If you say the word death/ In heaven,/ Nobody understands"; or in "Second Draft," when the embodied self explains, "…I said// Being mortal,/ I aspire to/ Mortal things.// I need you,/ Said my soul,/ If you're telling the truth."

Indeed, in Draft of a Letter Longenbach has fashioned an introspective and personal dialogue that simultaneously results in an unusually inviting and accessible new work.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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An extended meditation on how death affects those left behind, Under Sleep is a skillfully understated, beautifully rendered elegy for the poet’s partner. Formally inventive and technically sophisticated, Daniel Hall attends to the power of death to haunt every perception. The poet’s voice registers as though he were walking on the bottom of the ocean, in a state of mind somewhere "under sleep," in a kind of waking dream. In Hall’s hands, isolated moments of perception bloom into truly touching love elegies.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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In 2005 the Boston Globe published an editorial lamenting the lack of English translations of foreign literature. "In a literary global world, one is what one reads. And in the United States, foreign fare is too scarce." The Globe, however, did single out one exemplary program—the National Endowment for the Arts translation grants—and one of its recipients—Patrick Barron, who used his grant money to translate contemporary Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto—as indication that translation is alive and well. Now, all of Barron's translations of this inestimable modern master are available in The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto: A Bilingual Edition.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Draft of a Letter is a book about belief—not belief in the unknowable but belief in what seems bewilderingly plain. Pondering the bodies we inhabit, the words we speak, these poems discover infinitude in the most familiar places. The revelation is disorienting and, as a result, these poems talk to themselves, revise themselves, fashioning a dialogue between self and soul that opens outward to include other voices, lovers, children, angels, and ghosts. For James Longenbach, great distance makes the messages we send sweeter. To be divided from ourselves is never to be alone. "If the kingdom is in the sky," says the body to the soul, "Birds will get there before you." "In time," says the awakening soul, "I liked my second / Body better / Than the first." To live, these poems insist, is to arise every day to the strange magnificence of the people and places we thought we knew best. Draft of a Letter is an unsettled and radiant paradiso, imagined in the death-shadowed, birth-haunted middle of a long life.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Hard Bread, Peg Boyers’s debut poetry collection, with verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and brilliant lyricism. In Honey with Tobacco, Boyers’s own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poet’s Cuban American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, a father, and a son, a postmodern holy family whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative. The final section of the book confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems that plumb baser human instincts and the speakers’ determination to dwell in darkness, when necessary, without abandoning the sacred.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Every day the website Poetry Daily presents at least one new work from a contemporary poet excerpted from a book, magazine, or journal currently in print, with the goal of exposing the general reader to the wonderful, but often esoteric realm of modern poetics. Last Friday two of Charles Bernstein's poems were featured on the site, including the poem "Thank You for Saying Thank You" from his most recent book Girly Man. Befitting, or perhaps belying Poetry Daily's theme of "poetry for the people" Bernstein's poem begins:

This is a totally
accessible poem.
There is nothing
in this poem
that is in any
way difficult
to understand.
All the words
are simple &
to the point.
There are no new
concepts, no
theories, no
ideas to confuse
you. This poem
has no intellectual
pretensions. It is
purely emotional.

You can check out the rest of this poem as well as Bernstein's "Didn't We" on the Poetry Daily website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Poetry
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Last week, Robert Pinsky's Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post featured Charles Bernstein's latest book, Girly Man. As Pinsky notes, much of the work in Girly Man is a meditation on the medium of language itself, an approach to poetry that makes for a refreshing departure from rhetorical convention. Pinsky writes:

Charles Bernstein writes both prose and poetry about poetry, sometimes brilliantly, in ways calculated to upset the middlebrow and thwart the bland. The more you like the poetic equivalent of a nice tune, easy to hum, the more Bernstein means to disrupt your complacency.

We have been delighted to publish several of Bernstein's books and his latest, Girly Man, is another provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of verse from one of America's most innovative poets.

We are also always delighted to have another opportunity—though the month of April is barely visible on the frozen horizon— to refer readers to Bernstein's equally provocative essay, "Against National Poetry Month As Such."

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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On Tuesday, Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, posted an interesting comment on his blog about Joshua Weiner's recent book of poems, From the Book of Giants. He notes that Weiner's book includes a cleverly updated version of Martial's epigram 10.47—a poem composed of a list of the things necessary for "the good life."

As Stothard points out, it is a list that has been drawn from and imitated profusely throughout the centuries, translated into new languages and fitted into new meters, but whose underlying significance has retained a particular continuity that reappears almost two thousand years later in Weiner's post-modern verse—indeed it is a telling comment on our society that even a work of poetry as informed by modernity as this one still warrants acknowledgment in terms of its classical predecessors. Find out more about the book and read an excerpted poem on its UCP webpage.

Also, note that Weiner will be doing readings in the next few months, especially in April. See our author events page for particulars.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry
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The first substantial translation of Sereni's work published anywhere in the world, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni is a unique guide to this classic twentieth-century poet. This bilingual edition collects the most representative poems from Sereni's oeuvre, as well as a selection of prose works that extends the themes of his poetry. The book also contains examples of Sereni's short fiction, published here in English for the first time. With a full chronology, commentary, bibliography, and learned introduction by distinguished British poet and scholar Peter Robinson, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni is the only authorized rendering of Sereni's verse in English.

Read the press release.

Archived in Literature | Poetry | Press Releases
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Chicago poetry lovers will have a difficult choice to make tomorrow: Bernstein or Sereni? The work of both poets will be featured in events the evening of Thursday, November 30.

Language poet Charles Bernstein, author of over 30 books, including Girly Man, My Way, and With Strings is one of the most important figures working in the genre. He will be at the University of Chicago for a reading at 5:30 pm Thursday night in Rosenwald Hall, room 405, 1101 E. 58th Street. He will lecture on Friday at 1:00 pm in Classics, room 110. In preparation you can check out some Bernstein writings, including "Report from Liberty Street" and "Against National Poetry Month as Such".

Meanwhile downtown, Peter Robinson will present his English translations of the works of Italian poet Vittorio Sereni—one of the most important avant-garde Italian poets of the twentieth century—collected in the volume The Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni: A Bilingual Edition. The event will take place at 6:00 pm at the Italian Cultural Institute, 500 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1450.

Choose your poetics, choose a poet, you must choose.

Archived in Author Events | Poetry
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Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry's "complex of complaint and praise," Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son's baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11. The call for a five-minute silence throughout Europe in memory of those slain by Spanish guerillas triggers a meditation on the difficulties of responding to historical tragedy. And in a daring longer poem set in Berkeley, Weiner explores the relationship between political and aesthetic commitments and acts of self-invention.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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The Executive Director of the Fallen World is fearless and forthright, just the sort of blunt reality check that is missing from so much of contemporary, over-stylized poetry. Rector's stoicism and slightly murderous sense of humor pervade these poems as he doffs his hat to humility and audacity, taking on America, money, movement, marriages, and general cultural mayhem. The characters and voices in Rector's poems are, by tragic turns, unflinching, clearly and cleanly bitter, sarcastically East Coast, and lyrical.

As the former executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and a spirited First Amendment advocate who has sparred on screen with Bill O'Reilly, Liam Rector knows whereof he speaks in The Executive Director of the Fallen World.

Read the press release.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Robert Pinsky's weekly column for the Washington Post recently featured new work by Liam Rector from his book The Executive Director of the Fallen World. Pinsky writes:

Liam Rector's new book, The Executive Director of the Fallen World, expresses a stringent yet generous tone toward the profane, ignoble world of his title. Without necessarily forgiving himself or the rest of greedy and needy humanity, Rector chooses instead a dry, somewhat charitable acknowledgment that the world is… worldly.

Pinsky chooses the poem "Twenty-Three" and gives it a short but approving treatment to back up this assessment of Rector's work saying:

Fatalistic about the behavior of groups, ["Twenty-Three"] is resigned to the fallen nature of the individual. There's a forgiving element, a sad shrug and smile, in the idea that the vulnerabilities, failings and dreams of our early 20's persist, somewhere in us, for the rest of life. And though worldly, that notion… suggests the opposite of "disillusion": The beautiful albeit deluded youth inside us endures, and keeps wanting the world.

Pinsky's review reprints the full text of "Twenty-Three."

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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“Cofounder of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, from which language poetry takes its name, as well as the online poetics list and the audio poetry archive PENNsound, Bernstein is also a prolific critic and a consummate poet, as he shows again in this collection of seven discrete chapbooklike works. After the invocational four-poem opening of 'Let's Just Say,' the book moves to 'Some of These Daze,' Bernstein's prose dispatches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and on to the acerbic intimacies of 'World on Fire,' which critiques clichés like 'what are we fighting for?' 'In Parts' takes up the serial form Bernstein perfected in the classic Islets/ Irritations (1983) to examine the pieces of 'a world in which there are no narratives in which to believe// simultaneous double negative// flop flip.' A fascination with the sloganlike rhetoric of Tin Pan Alley runs through the collection, culminating in the title poem: 'So be a girly man/ & sing this gurly song/ Sissies & proud/ That we would never lie our way to war.'”—Publishers Weekly

Read the press release.

"Report from Liberty Street," one of the prose pieces included in the section "Some of These Daze," was originally published on the UCP Web site in October 2001.

Archived in Poetry | Press Releases
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Yesterday's New York Times Book Review has a review of Maggie Dietz's new collection of poems Perennial Fall. From the review:

When Dietz writes of bowls and hinges, I am reminded of Borges's distaste for the criticism of T. S. Eliot, who always seemed to be "agreeing with that professor or disagreeing with another." Borges preferred Emerson, whose writing suggested personal experience of his subjects, as does Dietz's best work, which is intimate, idiomatic, and thoroughly original. Thus "Bird Bath" which deals with grief, shows the side of the bereaved that is hopeful ("Mute eyes dreaming a sense / of heaven, of what is next.") and, at the same time, the side that is bereft ("But / everywhere the bald world and cold"). Even the saddest of topics becomes manageable in this poet's skillful hands.

At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge—the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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For his weekly poetry feature in the Washington Post, Robert Pinsky recently picked two poems by Kenneth Fields from his collection, Classic Rough News. Pinsky chose the poems "Cutting His Losses" and "Tangled," and analyzed some of the finer points of the author's meticulously constructed lines. Specifically, Pinsky focuses his praise on the clarity and intimacy with which Fields' language engages the difficult topic of alcoholism:

Many excellent movies and novels have dealt with the ordeal of alcoholism. So too, has poetry, including the recent book by Californian Kenneth Fields. Reflective and vivid, cool rather than melodramatic, these compact poems have a grotesque comedy that makes the booze-curse more dire, not less. Fields presents his characters—"Billy," "Burton," a woman called "Billie,"—with blunt appraisal, clear-eyed sympathy and understated judgement.… Though the material is sad, the poems have the bracing, redeeming and even exhilarating feeling that comes from precision.

We have another poem, "In The Place of Stories", also from Classic Rough News.

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Library Journal recently reviewed Stephen Yenser's Blue Guide. From the review: "Readers encounter the work of a technical virtuoso.… Attentive readers who have high expectations of contemporary poetry will find much to hold their interest."

Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words, Stephen Yenser takes readers on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised by human weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece, the poems of Blue Guide cast the shadow of mortality, and the tones are elegiac.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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The Green Bay Press Gazette recently featured an article about Maggie Dietz. Jean Peerenboom interviewed Dietz and reviewed her new poetry book Perennial Fall. From the article: "They are poems that will make you stop, think and imagine."

At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge—the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the liminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations.

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
Posted by at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The LA Weekly recently published a favorable review of Stephen Yenser's Blue Guide. From the review by Tom Cheyney: "Yenser's new collection, Blue Guide, inhabits a creative zone where playful formalism coexists comfortably with flights of free association and jazz improvisation, where keenly skewed observations ripple through a steady-flowing current of parental and fraternal love and seriously tweaked humor.… He deeply cares about humankind but can't overcome entropy's overwhelming yank and pull or capture memory's elusive clarity for long. Fond of alliteration, pun and cadence, Yenser seeks out syllabic and sonorous synchronicities.… Whether perused on the page or heard aloud, Yenser's poems reveal a contender in our midst."

Archived in Poetry | Reviews
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In an essay for the Poetry Foundation, Joshua Weiner, author of The World's Room, examines the poetry world's ongoing debate over the "best" poems.

When we read a list, on what do we pass judgment? On the list maker, to be sure… also ourselves…. And what are we judging in the list maker and, by extension, in ourselves? Two things, I think—personal taste and perception of history. We all have our personal lists of what we like best (taste) because we think it an example of the best of its kind (history). When a list goes public with the intention of establishing claims on our attention and gaining our approval, we become participants in the struggle of forming canons. And in the world of poetry, such struggles are ongoing, strange, and sometimes fierce.

Weiner explores these struggles while comparing various poetry anthologies, and, in the end, discovers that T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" seems to be the one poem nearly everyone can agree on. Read the rest of Joshua Weiner's essay "If You Read, You'll Judge."

Joshua Weiner's The World's Room is a dynamic first collection in which the literary and the personal, the elevated and the slangy, the sacred and the profane are beautifully intertwined. From nursery rhymes to riddles to prose poems, Weiner's work displays boundless imaginative and linguistic possibilities. We will publish Weiner's new book From the Book of Giants later this year.

Read an excerpt from The World's Room.

Archived in Poetry
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Charles Bernstein is one of America's liveliest advocates and practitioners of radically inventive poetry. So why does he have a beef with National Poetry Month? A nationwide celebration of his craft during the entire month of April—what's not to like? Plenty, says Bernstein. In an essay titled "Against National Poetry Month As Such" he writes:

National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally "positive." The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an "easy listening" station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way. "Accessibility" has become a kind of Moral Imperative based on the condescending notion that readers are intellectually challenged, and mustn't be presented with anything but Safe Poetry. As if poetry will turn people off to poetry.

Read the rest of "Against National Poetry Month As Such."

Bernstein is perhaps best known as one of the founders of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1970s. He is the author of My Way: Speeches and Poems and With Strings. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, "not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging."

Visit Charles Bernstein's Web site.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Poetry
Posted by at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

On March 27 at 8:00 p.m., Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominee Gail Mazur will read from Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems at the Blacksmith House (56 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA). The event is part of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, which Mazur founded in 1973.

Zeppo's First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazur's four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its searching poignancy and comic bravura.

In his review of Zeppo's First Wife, former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky wrote, "Audacity and modesty: In Mazur's work, those apparent opposites reveal their secret kinship: Modesty from its place on the sidelines can see through the conventional sham of the rules, and audacity has the confidence to embrace the plain, ordinary truth. In the face of demons or emptiness, Mazur offers a song."

Read a poem from Zeppo's First Wife.

See all our books by Gail Mazur.

Archived in Author Events | Poetry
Posted by at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday, nominees for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize were announced. We are happy to report that Gail Mazur's Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems is a nominee in the poetry category. Winners will be named on April 28.

Widely acclaimed for expanding the stylistic boundaries of both the narrative and meditative lyric, Gail Mazur's poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppo's First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazur's four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its searching poignancy and comic bravura. Mazur's explorations of "this fallen world, this loony world" are deeply moving acts of empathy by a singular moral sensibility—evident from the earliest poem included here, the much-anthologized "Baseball," a stunning bird's-eye view of human foibles and passions. Clear-eyed, full of paradoxical griefs and appetites, her poems brave the most urgent subjects—from the fraught luscious Eden of the ballpark, to the fragility of our closest human ties, to the implications for America in a world where power and war are cataclysmic for the strong as well as the weak.

Gail Mazur's books include Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems, They Can't Take That Away from Me, and The Common, all published by the University of Chicago Press

Read an excerpt from Zeppo's First Wife.

Read an excerpt from They Can't Take That Away From Me.

Read an excerpt from The Common.

Archived in Awards | Books for the News | Poetry
Posted by at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Gail Mazur will read from Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems on March 4 at 8 p.m., at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.

Yesterday, the Provincetown Banner featured an article about Mazur. Sue Harrison asked Mazur if writing poems about her husband was off limits:

"I'm unsentimental and I don't write love poems," she says, adding that if she does there is usually some wry twist.

An exception to that is "Air Drawing" from They Can't Take That Away From Me, which was a National Book Award finalist.

In that poem, Mazur takes a roundabout, unsentimental way to deal with love by recalling [her husband] Mike's brush with death. In the poem, the narrator is reading a mystery book and watching her husband sleep.

I watch his right hand float
in our bedroom's midnight,
inscribe forms by instinct on the air,
arterial, calligraphic
figures I'm too literal to follow…
Is this the way it has to be —
one of us always vigilant,
watching over the unconscious
other, the quick elusory
tracings on the night's space.
That night two years ago
in the hospital, tubes
in his pale right hand,
in his thigh, I asked myself,
Does he love me?
and if he does,
how could he let that steely man
in green scrubs snake his way
nearer to his heart
than I've ever gone?

"I tell my students they can't use the word heart as the seat of love," she says, and explains how she sidestepped one of her own basic rules for avoiding tired or clichéd phrases. "I love that irrational leap of jealousy because the surgeon was getting closer to the heart than I could."

Read the rest of the article.

Gail Mazur's books include Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems, They Can't Take That Away from Me, and The Common, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Read an excerpt from They Can't Take That Away From Me.

Read an excerpt from The Common.

Archived in Author Events | Poetry
Posted by at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you believe that love is better described as "the drunken kisses of cyclones" than the predictable cheesiness found in a Hallmark card, then you'll be cheered by the paperback release of Surrealist Love Poems, edited by Mary Ann Caws. This collection from such luminaries as André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Paul Eluard celebrates the irrational, obsessive, impassioned, and erotic states of love, demonstrating throughout the truth of Breton's words, that "the embrace of poetry like that of the flesh / As long as it lasts / Shuts out all the woes of the world." The book also includes fourteen alluring photographs from the likes of Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun.

Read three poems from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Commentary | Poetry
Posted by DB at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991), many of whose books were published by Chicago, wrote two poems about the space shuttle. "On An Occasion of National Mourning" was written after the Challenger accident. "Witnessing the Launch of the Shuttle Atlantis" was written for NASA, during the time that Nemerov was poet laureate of the United States.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry
Posted by DB at 01:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A piece by John Noble Wilford in the New York Times is occasioned by the anniversaries of the destruction of the space shuttles Challenger (twenty years ago on January 28, 1986) and Columbia (three years ago on February 1, 2003) and the fire that killed three Apollo astronauts (thirty-nine years ago on January 27, 1967).

Ten years ago we published The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA by Diane Vaughan which put forth the view—now widely accepted—that the Challenger accident was not the result of bad engineeering but of a management culture that normalized deviance: that flew missions even when presented with evidence of serious problems. The Columbia accident showed how difficult it is to change the patterns of organizational life.

Another author brought a different sensibility to the shuttle; you can read Howard Nemerov's two poems on the space shuttle.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry | Sociology
Posted by DB at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Love poetry includes, yes, descriptions of the beloved. And images of a fantastic idyll complete with falling stars, the sound of the sea, and beautiful countryside. In the hands of Surrealists, though, love poetry also includes gravediggers and murderers, dice and garbage, snakeskin purses and "the drunken kisses of cyclones." Surrealism, the movement founded in the 1920s on the ashes of Dada's nihilism, embraced absurdity, contradiction, and, to a supreme extent, passion and desire.… Read the press release.

Read three poems from the book.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Poetry | Press Releases
Posted by at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)