Some New Acquisitions Fall 2005

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The Verse Book of Interviews, edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki.
Amherst, Verse Press, 2005.

27 Interviews originally published in the feisty little Verse magazine, Includes a wide variety of poets, from John Kinsella to Anselm Berrigan and Marcella Durand. Others included are Tomas Salamun, Charles Wright, August Kleinzahler, Christine Hume and Laura Solomon, Edward Dorn, Martin Espada, Medbh McGuckian, Reginald Shepherd, Agha Shahid Ali, Claudia Rankin, Marjorie Welish, John Yau, Lisa Jarnot, Matthew Rohrer, Dara Wier, Tessa Rumsey, Hayden Carruth, Miroslav Holub, Heather Ramsdell, Kate Fagan, Don Paterson, Kevin Hart and Ales Debeljak. All of which reflects favorably the inclusiveness of the magazine. It would have been good to have an introduction by Zawacki and/or Henry, placing the interviews and the magazine, in some context, however. Certainly there must be a context for everything, however generous and inclusive.

Christopher Logue. Logue’s Homer: Cold Calls (War Music continued)
London, Faber & Faber, 2005.

Another, the next to last, installment of, one of the most fascinating of contemporary projects. A not quite translation, but meditation on the first poem.

Writing in our Time, Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003), by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy. Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005.

Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, edited by Lorna Crozier & Patrick Lane. Roberts Creek, British Columbia, Nightwood Editions, 2004.

Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, edited with an introduction by Sina Queyras. New York, Persea Books, 2005.

Three new books, on and of more or less contemporary Canadian poetry. Writing in Our Time serves as a critical history of Canadian poetry, with 16 essays by alternatively Bunting or Rudy, each on a different aspect of the contemporary (the sixties and after) scene. Includes whole chapters on Nicole Brossard, bp Nichol, Robin Blaser, Daphne Marlatt, Lisa Robertson and Jeff Derksen, among others. A chapter apiece to the Kootenay School and one of Fred Wah’s books. The stress is on writing in community and alternative community at that. The somewhat fractured format is enticingly realistic and the writing on various events, happenings and documents is useful, as are the chronologies. The two anthologies have only one writer in common (Joe Denham), with Breathing Fire 2 begin more contemporary than Open Field (Of the writers in Breathing I recognized exactly none). An exciting trifecta.

Robert Bly. My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy. New York, Harper Collins, 2005.

A collection of 48 of Bly’s three line ghazals. Tenderly, romantically and unusually interesting works.

Whether they are technically ghazals our not is another story.

Robert Lowell. The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005.

"Dear John/I’ve read your marvelous prayer at the end of your book, and can hardly find words to praise it. Though cunning in its skepticism, it feels like a Catholic prayer to a personal God. I like the humorous, anguished admission of faults, somewhat like Corbier to whom your book is appealingly dedicated. I think to of Verlaine’s religious poems, you too noble, down under, improper. Anyway, its one of the great poems of the age, a puzzle and triumph to anyone who wants to write a personal devotional poem.”
(from Letter 576, to John Berryman on “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”)

James Wright. A Wild Perfection. The Selected letters of James Wright. Edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005.

“Don’t you understand? Bly is not a fool by any means. Quite the contrary. He has an enormous intelligence, and moreover he has the weird talent for suspending everything in this intelligence from its characteristic catholicity in order that he might direct all of its extraordinary power along one channel---the channel of the new style. So you are not justified in saying that his remark about your book is bitter.”
(from a letter to Donald Hall, September 17, 1958)

Linh Dinh. American Tatts. Tucson, Chax Press, 2005.

Wild poems, mixing satire, political and social, elaborated and adorned with parking lots, Simone Weil and Magic Mountain. Terribly offending and characteristically generous work.

“Since Floridians have nothing they crave everything
Their elaborate gift-giving is merely folk theatre.
A Floridian would hand you a dish towel and say,
This is the wedding dress of the Empress of China”.
From “The Air in Florida”

Anne Waldman. Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble. New York, Penguin, 2004.

Poems of upward spiritual movement, of pilgrimage, a meditational structure for discovery and enlightenment, this book has the generous and charming spirit of its author. This sequence of poems is an elegiac narrative homage to the Ancient Buddhist monument of Borobudur in Java, and a pathless path for life in a war torn world.

Cole Swensen. The Book of A Hundred Hands. University of Iowa Press, 2005.

125 Poems in 9 sections, in fact. Done in the manner of etchings, drawings, liminations these are poems of meditative ekphrasis by a most sensitive senser. A book of poetical research into the workings of the hand, the legend and lore of the hand, the purpose and symbology of the hand.

Jackson MacLow. Doings: Performance Pieces. Granary, 2005.

A book of incredible spectacle by the Herman Melville of experimental poetry. Instructions, illustrations and historical context, a handbook of the nonintentional and procedural empire. Accompanied by a CD.

Ange Mlinko. Starred Wire. Coffee House Press, 2005.

A carnival of a book, of “Boolean chastity,” “Matissean say-so,” “kinesthetic mouthing,” “spongiform innocence.” “Today we’ll see, Wild Epiphenomenon, how to stay under the sky.”

Robert Kelly. Lapis. Black Sparrow/Godine, 2005.

Book number sixty-three of the deep image surrealist Robert Kelly, faithfully tuned into the daily practice of poetry. A wide and generous sensibility is displayed in a jumble of poems. And in one poem he calls John Yau “hell’s choir boy.”

Michelle Robinson. The Life of a Hunter. University of Iowa Press, 2005.

A dialog between surface and depth, not in regard to meaning but sustenance and structure. Narratives of friendly struggle with ourselves, “the delicious complicity in the fast pace.”

Geraldine Kim. Povel. Fence Books, 2005.

A memoir gone out of control, a play of painless proportions, the best of the lot, the star of the sea, the triumph of Tupperware, a poem mixed up with a novel. Not since Don Juan or The Golden Gate (book not bridge). Introduction not by Lyn Hejinian.

Geoffrey Nutter. Water’s Leaves & Other Poems. Verse, 2005.

Although a little uneven, a worthwile volume, not up to the author’s usual manic playground writing.

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Dissonance (If you are interested). University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Waldrop, proprietor with her husband of Burning Deck Press, is a central figure in oppositional poetics and in European-American poetic relations. This collection of essays, ranging over the last 30 years, is intelligent, intellectual andEuropean.