Category: Poetry

These prose-poems are about the idea of “inland,” the idea of the prairie: location, self and voice (and race) and what that means in a given place, metaphor, juxtaposition, repetition. (“What’s your body in the set of places?” one poem asks (p 23).) These poems are full of “foxes,” the fact of the animals but…

This is a book of quiet poems, quiet beauty: there’s something of magic and majesty in Merwin’s descriptions of stars, birds, planets, rivers, in phrases like “the green heart of the woods” (p 13). These are poems concerned with memory, with family, with nature, with sight—perhaps mostly with memory: “here surfacing through the long/backlight of…

When I like Frank O’Hara’s poems, I like them lots, yet I didn’t like this book as a whole as much as I’d expected to. What I like best are his shorter and more straightforward poems, his “I do this I do that” poems, as he called them. I like “Walking to Work” and “Music”…

What I like about these poems are the moments of clear calm in them, like this line from the first poem, “Fortune-Telling from the Seabed”: “Transparent water reveals the clear constellations of pebbles resting on the bottom” (p 3), or “That August night it poured stars like glass” (p 20). Large parts of this collection…

I like Grace Paley’s poems, how conversational they are, and how the best ones are full of a strong voice, or a sense of place. I like the way her New York poems, like the one on page 15, which begins “a new york city man is,” are perfectly observed city-moments, this one a man…

“Vetiver,” the first poem in this collection, is one of my favorites: the slow grace of it: image, image, image, motion, the shift from the first stanza to the casual “Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand” of the second (p 3). “The Ice Storm” is a poem in which to feel…

These are poems concerned with creation, with music and art and language and form. There’s a playfulness to them, sometimes, with flip phrasing, end-of-poem rhymes, word-play. The paragraph-poem that starts with “A photograph” is perhaps my favorite: “A photograph. A photograph admits. A photograph admits space. A photograph admits space around its subject. A photograph…

“Ah, it’s the feral/that interests me […]” Seiferle writes in “On the Island of Bones.” These are poems about desire, paradise, what is wild and cannot be tamed. Eroticism in red raspberries, in clams, in snapdragons. I find the poems that tell everyday stories to be the most solid, like “Eye Center” or “The Butterfly…

These poems are concerned with daily rhythms of the title, but also longer ones: geologic, planetary, evolutionary time-scales. Birds recur throughout, often in sudden flight, like those in the second poem that “drop and lift off the roof,/aerial sweeps, or just bursts of/ feather, wings, claws […]” or the “sixteen waxwings in the juniper” in…