Category: Poetry
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Bellini in Istanbul by Lillias BeverTupelo Press, 2005
Archaeology as metaphor, excavation: bringing things to the light, brushing off the sand and dust. I am, generally speaking, a sucker for poems about art, poems about seeing, and so it’s not surprising that I enjoyed this collection. (The last poem, “Blue Guide to Istanbul,” was perhaps my favorite: descriptions of blue objects, small &…
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Rebecca Letters by Laynie BrowneKelsey St. Press, 1997
Time and seasons and light and ritual: boiling water, bundling warm against the cold. “Armlet” seems like “amulet”: little protections, memories.
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Begin Again: Collected Poems by Grace PaleyFarrar Straus Giroux, 2000
I already knew I loved Grace Paley’s short stories, and it turns out that I love her poems, too. I love her city-poems, about streets I recognize, like “An Arboreal Mystery” (which begins with the lines “On Jane Street in October/I saw three gingko trees”) and “20th Street Spring” (about the seminary way out on…
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Fear of Subways by Maureen SeatonThe Eighth Mountain Press, 1991
Sometimes this book seemed dated: not just because New York in 1991 was a different place from New York in 2000, in 2005, but maybe also because’s of Seaton’s particular politics and experiences, her life and her anger and the shit she had to deal with on a daily basis because of who she loved,…
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Dailies & Rushes by Susan Kinsolving
The first poem was perhaps my favorite: a child asks for a magnifying glass when she means to ask for a microscope. Also pleasing: “My Late Father’s Junk Mail.” Elsewhere, slightly less interest: Kinsolving does interesting things with form, with rhyme and half-rhyme, but nothing really grips.
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Valentine Place by David LehmanScribner Paperback Poetry, 1996
Some of these poems (all about men & women) struck me as too obscure: not pleasant to try to unpack, more like hitting a wall. I do enjoy Lehman’s tone, though, his line-breaks and ends of sentences, but I like it more in other books, not this one.
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Decreation by Anne CarsonBorzoi Books (A.A. Knopf), 2005
I read this book last month, quickly, and loved it, though I didn’t yet have anything to say about it. So I took a break, read some lighter things, and then picked it up again. On a second reading, familiar with the arguments and names and allusions, I was more able to grin at Carson’s…
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Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthea HarveyGraywolf Press, 2004
Poems filled with twists of meanings, wordplay that depends on the break of a line (“Little was left of the forest./Large was ten miles ahead.”). Images that resonate (ducks glowing softly in the night, snow falling between trains). Wit and subtlety and a little bit of sadness. As entire pieces, the prose poems are my…
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Vita Sackville West: Selected Writings edited by Mary Ann CawsPalgrave Macmillan, 2003 (Palgrave, 2002)
A mix of the very interesting and the less interesting. Wonderful: all of the short stories, the novella Seducers in Ecuador, with its shifts in perspective and pleasingly strange conceit, some of the poetry (lines about winter light, autumn color). These lines, from “The Quarryman”: “New shapes, new planes, undreamed by architect; An accidental beauty,…
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When a Woman Loves a Man by David LehmanScribner, 2005
Poems with forms, poems without forms, poems about love and music and literature and poetry. Sestinas, pantoums (a circle of a poem, ending with the opening line), an abecedarius or two, a villanelle made up entirely of anagrams of W.H. Auden’s full name. Many of these poems are funny; others are simply beautiful.