About Andrew Goodspeed

Reviewed:  The Halo Rule by Teresa Leo. Elixir Press, 2008. Teresa Leo possesses what a previous generation of critics would have termed an incoherent sensibility. This is not intended to denigrate. It implies instead that her poetical world is notable for the disillusionment and discontinuity of its subjects. In the world of The Halo Rule, [...]

Reviewed: Azores by David Yezzi. Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2008.   Poets and critics alike must resist being swayed by their own rhetoric. In a critic this results in imprecision, emotion, and incoherence. For poets, such wavering leads too often into portentous vapidity. Both critics and poets enjoy the language, but they are commonly moved to [...]

Reviewed: James Agee: Selected Poems. Edited by Andrew Hudgins. American Poets Project: The Library of America, $20.    The next time you visit a bookstore, please look through the poetry selection. Likely it is full of the dead—T.S. Eliot, Goethe, Chaucer, Virgil. But if the bookstore is any good, it will also offer scores of [...]

As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by Kevin Young. Library of America, 2004. Kevin Young’s admirable edition of John Berryman’s verse (for the Library of America’s American Poets Project) meets the primary expectations readers may bring to a new edition of Berryman’s selected poetry. It offers a responsibly chosen representative sampling [...]

As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed Rhinoceros by Kevin Ducey. American Poetry Review. $23.00 Kevin Ducey’s great strength is his daring. He frequently appears silly, he risks silliness in his work, and this silliness sometimes succeeds admirably. Few modern poets have that sense of daring, and it is a point to Ducey’s credit that he has [...]

As Reviewed By: Andrew Goodspeed There is no key to Samuel Beckett’s poetry. It is a body of work that can be as oblique, resistant, and complex to the scholar as it is to a novice reader. Even his fervent admirers tend to regard it as recondite and baffling. For those unconvinced by Beckett, the [...]