Some Spring Books (2006)

Louise Gluck. Averno. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Almost as startling as The Wild Iris, a series of meditations on the big things, on questions of the soul and the spirit, these are a mixture of the visionary with the daily, the mythical with the commonplace. They are fragments signaling an underlying uneasily mystical and uncertain order.

Rodney Jones. Salvation Blues. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Subtitled One hundered Poems 1985-2005, this is really a selected poems. It includes poems from each of his books from The Unborn on, and some New Poems. A good sampler from an inquisitive and exhuberant poet.

Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary. Edited by Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr. New York. Palgrave, 2006.

The avant-garde invades the curriculum. A smart collection of essays (22) on a variety of modes and strategies for teaching contemporary poetry. Among the contributors are Charels Bernstein, Alan Golding, Lytle Shaw (on Goethe!), Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen and Bob Holman. Impressive and instigating.

Edward Hirsch. Poets Choice. New York, Harcourt, 2006.

This is a collection of Hirsch’s elegantly literate columns from The Washington Post Book World, some 130 in all, from a variety of cultures and times. Entertaining and intelligent, short takes. Be Afraid, New York Times Book Review, Be Very Afraid.

Noelle Kocot. Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems. Seattle, Wave Books, 2006.

The poet is the Brooklyn Born daughter of Andre Breton and Emily Dickinson, who says “Once I was ordinary.” I doubt that---these poems are anything but ordinary, including the long elegy “Poem for the End of Time.”

David Wojahn. Interrogation Palace, New and Selected Poems 1982-2004. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.

A nice collection by this former University of Arizona MFA grad. Imaginative and formally interesting poetry. And despite the blurbs by Komunyakaa, Dean Young, Jean Valentine and Tom Sleigh, not well known enough. Can you tell what someone’s poetry is going to be like by the blurbistas?

A.E. Stallings. HAPAX. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2006.

Exhbiting an extreme formalist turn, this is nevertheless an interesting book. Does the rhyme hinder her work? Does the tightness delight or bore? The reader might be constantly thrown out of the poem. GreeK! Roman! There is Anti-blurb on the back cover.

Laura Sims. Practice, Restraint. New York, Fence Books, 2006.

The 2005 Alberta book from Fence, a restrained, almost formal volume by a wild girl bank worker. Minimalism? A minimalism that shakes. And talk about blurbistas: Rare Armantraut, Cole Swenson, C. D. Wright. That's some grace the book has going for it.