Category: Poetry

A book of poems that uses plain language to describe a surreal world in which police officers appear at a man’s front door for no apparent reason, asking about 40-year-old alibis or whether there’s too much happiness in the house. Body parts talk, and if you set out in a car or bus, there’s no…

Time and age and beauty and art. Color and light, illumination. Consciousness as attention, the focused outward gaze that takes the world in. Several “Heaven for _____” poems, all beautiful. Heaven for Stanley, Heaven for Arden, Heaven for Paul. This is a book that I am glad to own, that I know I will enjoy…

Winged details: pinecones like rose petals, the curves of a pagoda’s roof, yellow soil, narrow streets. I love the poem on cities: London, Boston, New York in 1896 but it could almost be now. The trouble is how to capture joy, ideas: sometimes it works, sometimes it’s all overblown, exclamation points and rhetorical form. But…

“Conimicut, Matunuck, Meshanticut”: so starts one of the lists of Rhode Island place-names in the introduction to this book. I grew up in Rhode Island; until I was five, we lived on Shawomet Avenue, within walking distance of Conimicut Point. These words have always been part of my vocabulary: Conanicut Island, Pawtucket, Chepachet. Waldrop writes…

Details like: the smell of garlic and how it lingers, how bedtime stories start in Japanese. Repitition of lines as one way to fragment the text, words inserted another, quotations (Barthes, Flaubert, Said) another still. Splitting the text open, splitting open sorrow: this is a book of elegies for a dead mother, and they are…