Month: July 2005

As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. 71 pages.

The trick of transparency, like all sleight of hand, does not admit close scrutiny.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar

Fourteen On Form: Conversations with Poets by William Baer. University Press of Mississippi. 265 pages.

The liveliest moment in William Baer’s collection of table-talk occurs in an interview with Douglas Dunn at St.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. USA $24.00, Canada $37.00

Anne Carson’s most recent collection, Men in the Off Hours, is a conspicuous departure from the uniform tone and patient psychological exploration of her previous book, Autobiography of Red, which, for all its intellectual elegance, was essentially a bildungsroman, a formational novel in verse.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Americana by John Updike. Knopf, US $23. 95 pages.

John Updike balances upon, and in many ways defines, the center of the beam in American literature.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Part 9: Anne Sexton

It is a peculiar pleasure to hear Anne Sexton read her poems, though her parched agony carries through and occasionally sends a shiver down the spine.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Part 7: Five American Women Poets

Voice of the Poet: Five American Women
Gertrude Stein, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Muriel Rukeyser

Gertrude Stein is the odd woman out in this collection, her fame owing as it does to a broad array of achievements.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Part 6: James Merrill

James Merrill is usually imagined as a genteel lyric poet who lived a genteel lyrical life, engaged by purely domestic concerns, whether in New England or Greece, while turning out some of the most balanced and swiftly canonical American poems of the century.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Part 5: John Ashbery

John Ashbery has often been described as the most important poet writing in English today. Even if this cannot be said with any great deal of enthusiasm, one may relent and admit that he is certainly the most influential poet to cast seeds on American soil for some time.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Part 4: Elizabeth Bishop

In 1962, as CIA analysts stood over grainy photographs of what they believed to be Russian missile bases in Cuba, Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her poem ‘Sandpiper’ of the sea receding, where “(no detail too small) the Atlantic drains / rapidly backwards and downwards.”… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Part 3: Sylvia Plath

Few twentieth-century poets in English have achieved such lofty heights of fame or been surrounded by such cumbrous shrouds of legend as Sylvia Plath.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Part 2: Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell’s poetry and criticism have lately experienced individual resurgences. Even his children’s books, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, have proven very popular.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

Part 1: W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden is ordinarily depicted as the leading, in fact the best-loved, member of his generation of English poets, the generation falling between the airy heights of T.… continue reading...

As Reviewed By: Ernest Hilbert

A Series on Recorded Poetry

Thoughtful readers of poetry are attuned to the musical subtleties of the human voice. These qualities shape the poetry, and most poetry—purely optical or purposely discordant linguistic experiments notwithstanding—should be heard, either as an acoustic mental image, when read silently, or spoken aloud.… continue reading...