Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions by Maurice Manning. Yale University Press, 2001. Small Gods of Grief by Laura-Anne Bosselaar. Boa Editions, 2001. Saunter by Joshua Mckinney. University of Georgia Press, 2001. As Reviewed By: Ravi Shankar Every year, with the regularity of migrating birds, a new flock of first poetry books takes wing, usually with [...]

A Close Reading of Two Contemporary Indian Poets As Reviewed By: Ravi Shankar The world’s largest secular democracy has been exporting its letters in English for a few literary generations, but in the wake of a few luminaries—Rabindranath Tagore or more recently, Arundhati Roy—many strident, lyrical voices have gone unrecognized (after all, this wave of [...]

Crucible by Daniel Bosch. Winner of the Boston Review’s First Annual Poetry Contest. Handsel Books, 2002. Discography by Sean Singer. Yale Series of Younger Poets. Yale University Press, 2002. As Reviewed By: Ravi Shankar Daniel Bosch, who won the Boston Review’s annual poetry contest for his first book Crucible, is a “poet’s poet”, a distinction [...]

Notes from the Divided Country by Suji Kwock Kim. Louisiana State University Press, 2003. 20 Poems by Seán MacFalls. Peregrine Press, 2001. Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive by Patrick Rosal. Persea Books, 2003. As Reviewed By: Ravi Shankar Like the saw of a New England farmer, transplanted from rockier soil, when the leaves turn fiery [...]

By: Stephen Schwartz This is an intensely personal, and elliptical, and non-Aristotelian story. As a young man I looked for a poem, afraid I could not find it. And even after I found it, I kept looking. I was told by a distinguished Brazilian “concrete poet,” who visited California but whose name I have forgotten: some poems [...]

By: Stephen Schwartz On March 7, the North American poet Philip Lamantia, the only successful English-language versifier in the French surrealist style to appear in this hemisphere, died of heart failure in San Francisco, his native city, at 77. Lamantia was also a pioneer in the use of hallucinogenic drugs by intellectuals in the United [...]

A Personal Survey of Modern Verse in Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania (Part II) As Reviewed By: Stephen Schwartz II. Modern Bosnian literature As should be seen throughout the present essay, translation is a difficult art, especially when dealing with poets from a cultural context so different from ours, as North Americans. The challenge of translation was recently [...]

A Personal Survey of Modern Verse in Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania As Reviewed By: Stephen Schwartz I will begin this highly selective and idiosyncratic discussion of modern Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Albanian poetry with an anecdote. While barely known in the West, this episode represents the first penetration, in the form of an exclusively personal relationship, [...]

Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems by W. S. Di Piero. Knopf, 2007. 247 pp. As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber A hardy strain of poets in America feels that the craft of poetry is often too crafty, that the verse line need be nothing more than a space in which to say something striking, and [...]

Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use by Robert B. Shaw. Ohio University Press, 2007. 305 pages. As Reviewed By: Jan Schreiber A bright woman of my acquaintance, educated in a field far from literature, recently asked me what poetry anthology I would recommend to help her become better acquainted with contemporary writing. [...]