New British Book

Of more than passing interest among our many new books this May is British writer
Matthew Francis's book Mandeville. It presents in a series of lyrical poems the innter life and outer adventures of the 14th Century traveller and adventurer, and storyteller Sir John Mandeville, whose book describing the travels of a knight in Africa, India and the Middle East in 1322 was a medieval best seller. The poems are sensitive and spirited, and surprisingly fresh.

This weeks new books are distinguished by collections by some of America's most distinguished poets. Included in this group of important work from the big publishers are the following:

James Tate. The Ghost Soldiers. Ecco, 2008
Richard Kenney. The One Strand River. Knopf, 2008
Jorie Graham. Sea Change Ecco, 2008
Frank Bidart. Watching the Spring Festival. Farrar Straus, 2008
Robert Pinsky. Gulf Music. Farrar, Straus, 2008
Charles Simic. That Little Something. Harcourt, 2008
Adam Zagajewski. Eternal Enemies. Farrar, Straus, 2008
August Kleinzahler. Sleeping it off in Rapid City. Farrar Straus, 2008.

These important volumes are joined by a new Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Knopf, 2008.
They were preceded in previous weeks by collected works of Ron Silliman. The Age of Huts and Leslie Scalapino. It's go in Horizontal Selected Poems, 1974-2006, as well as John Ashbery's Notes from the Air, Selected Later Poems.

New Books

Among the many recently received books the following may peak your interest.
Irish poet Michael Longley has a new Collected Poems out from Wake Forest University.
The wide variety and depth of the work make it well worth looking into. A New book in the University of California New California Poetry Series is Laura Walker's rimertown. Rachel Wetzsteon's second book, Sakura Park is new from Persea Books. And not to be missed are two books by Tucsonans, Jane Miller's magnificent Midnights and Morgan Schuldts equally exciting Verge.

Wallace Stevens

"Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle
Of mica, the dithering of grass,
The Arachne integument of dead trees,
Are the eye grown larger, more intense. "

from Variations on a Summer Day

Seven Notebooks

Campbell McGrath's new book, Seven Notebooks, has one of the nicest covers of any books we have received this year. It is a section of a Hiroshige woodblock print.
Hiroshige turns up in several of the poems that make up the book, which is composed in a variety of stanzaic forms, from Haiku to prose blocks of some length. The subjects of the book include landscape (Chicago, Miami, New Jersery), memory, death, and the pure delight of perception. McGrath handles both the forms and the subjects with heartfelt mastery.

Marie Howe

The latest issue of Tin House has four poems from Marie Howe's new book, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. There are also poems by Charles Simic and the novelist Roberto Bolano, as well as Ryo Yamaguchi

Lyric Postmodernisms

Reginald Shepherd has put together a new anthology of "contemporary innovative poetries." This book includes 23 poets of (mainly) the middle generation (Peter Gizzi, Forest Gander, Donald Revell, Martha Ronk, Cole Swenson, etc). The poets work "in poems whose tactics range from the playful, the interrogative, the minimalist, the ironic, the lyrical, the extravagant and even the sublime, sometimes coexisting, sometimes operating by turn." The books title is Lyric Postmodernisms and it can be found among our new books sections.