The career of John Ashbery continues the poetic perpetuum mobile of our time. At 75, and with a new book, Chinese Whispers, he may be rounding bases all too familiar from earlier collections; but home runs hit in relation to times at bat keep him well within the Sammy Sosa range of powerhouses, if not Barry Bonds’s.

New British Poetry. Edited by Don Paterson and Charles Simic. Graywolf Press, 2005. $16 As Reviewed By: James Rother It’s been a while since the relative healthiness of relations between poets on this side of the pond and those still lodged in the mother country have been top priorities with editors of American literary journals. [...]

Western Art by Deborah Greger. Penguin Poets Series, 2004. $18. As Reviewed By: James Rother Debora Greger is one of those poets who can’t help obsessing about art’s hidden agenda—the one lurking beneath layers of veneration which for centuries have surrounded art with more awe and wonder than anything outside of revealed religion. Forget what [...]

Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems. University of Chicago Press, 2004. 245 pp. As Reviewed By: James Rother At your next party, try this on your poetry-loving guests. Ask if they can identify the trendy work in a foreign language from which the following, titled “Fallings from Us, Vanishings,” has been [...]

Concerning Some Recent Versions of the Metamorphoses by Ovid. As Reviewed By: James Rother [Unless otherwise attributed, all translations are the author’s.] It is remarkable, but hardly strange, that the works of Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (better known as Ovid [43 B.C.-17 A.D.], and spanning the emperies of Augustus and Tiberius), have been enjoying [...]

In Indian English poetry Bibhu Padhi belongs to the second generation of post-Independence poets. Some of his active contemporaries are Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali and Vikram Seth. Writing for the last twenty five years, Padhi has carved a niche for himself in Indian English poetry.

Bare Face by Jayanta Mahapatra. Kottayam: DC Books (India), 2000. $7.95. As Reviewed By: Rabindra K. Swain Today, when India is known abroad more for her fiction than her poetry, Jayanta Mahapatra’s sixteenth volume, Bare Face, arrives. Hopefully, it will win some readers, interested in that country’s literature, from the former genre. When Jayanta Mahapatra started [...]

Uncollected Poems and Prose by A. K. Ramanujan. Edited by Molly Daniels-Ramanujan and Keith Harrison. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. As Reviewed By: Rabindra K. Swain A. K. Ramanujan passed away in 1993, at the age of 64, in Chicago, where he had served at the university as William E. Colvin Professor. He had [...]

A Poem by Jayanta Mahapatra [private] [/private]

Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets, edited by Ranjit Hoskote. Viking (New Delhi) 2002. 148 pages. 195 Rupees. As Reviewed By: Rabindra K. Swain “For a time,” warns Michael Roberts in his introduction to the first edition of the influential anthology The Faber Book of Modern Verse, “the false poem may be more popular [...]