Category: Poetry

A sense of being adrift: this sense persists in Fisher’s poems, and in a satisfying way. Louise Glück writes, in the foreword, that “the poems move like dreams or spells […] succumb to movement as though it were desire” (xi). There is dream-logic and dream-motion, from the very first poem, “Journey,” on. The book begins…

A book about “what it is to see, and what it is to look through” (p 7). Swensen writes about window-glass and canvas: Pierre Bonnard’s paintings, Caillebotte’s “Young Man at His Window,” Alberti’s De Pictura, Hammershøi’s paintings of doors and light. Light and surfaces: where perspective draws the eye, or curiosity: a small object in…

In this slim (but not slight) collection of poems, Laurie Sheck draws from a number of inspirations: the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Smart, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American captivity narratives. Poems who take their titles from phrases within them (“But couldn’t cross,” “This austere and fierce machinery”) are interspersed with poems called…

“Like Hesiod,” writes Anne Carson, in her introduction to this volume, “Inger Christensen wants to give an account of what is—of everything that is and how it is and what we are in the midst of it” (ix). Which seems promising, as does the structure of the poem: prologos, logos, epilogos, and within logos, three…

These are poems to read and re-read, full of beautiful images. I like how Tranströmer writes about space, about place, whether that space is a forest or an island or the middle of Stockholm. There is so much light in these poems, and beauty, and joy and music, poems about Haydn and Schubert, poems with…

The pleasing poems in this book are divided into two sections, the “Curves” and “Angles” of the title, with a “Borgesian interlude” between them. The first section is more peopled than the second: as the author’s note explains, the curves “are the body’s curves,” while the angles are the “less giving lines of an inanimate…

The preface to this edition quotes from an interview that Ammons gave in 1995: these poems, Ammons says, “are sometimes very rigid and ritualistic, formal and off-putting, but very strong.” The preface also quote from a letter Ammons wrote in 1954, in which he gives this definition of the title’s first word: “the complex eye…

I like the rhythm and shape of Heaney’s poems, the solidity of them. Especially pleasing: the first-day-of-school details of “The Lagans Road,” the three parts of “Out of This World.”

The first poem in this collection uses, as its title, a phrase from near the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (“Go, litel bok”); Chaucer is quoted again in the fourth poem (which includes the line “our litel spot of erthe that with the see embracéd is”). Much of the book is similarly allusive (translations/reworkings…