In considering “the unspoken rules of book reviewing,” the editors came across David Wheatley’s superb essay on poet-critics (originally published in CPR a number of years ago) and decided to reprint a section of it (modified only by numbered bullets for emphasis). Here is the view “from across the pond” as it were. * * * [...]

Reviewed: A City of Angels: A Verse Play in Three Acts by Ben Mazer. Cy Gist Press, 2011 A verse drama—particularly when encountered, not on stage, but in a limited edition chapbook—has a tall order in front of it. It must, solely through dialogue, convey scene, emotion, and plot, even while working as verse. Ben [...]

The CPR editors recently received the following note from the Italian scholar Massimo Bacigalupo: Dear Scholars of Ezra Pound and Modernism: I thought you’d like to know that the house where Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound lived in Sant’Ambrogio di Zoagli, above Rapallo, is for sale. Only half of it, to be precise. If any [...]

Reviewed: Into These Knots by Ashley Anna McHugh. Ivan R. Dee, 2010. 68 pp. Hardcover. $22.50. Winner of the 2010 New Criterion Poetry Prize. In Ashley Anna McHugh’s “All Other Ground Is Sinking Sand” (“On Christ the solid rock I stand” goes the previous line of the hymn this title is taken from), a villanelle [...]

Reviewed:  Rain by Don Paterson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009. 61 pages. What we most love we must lose. That implacable fact of human existence is the ground bass of Don Paterson’s excellent book Rain. It would be wrong to treat the book as a syllogism deriving the importance of love from its improbability and our [...]