About D. H. Tracy

Reviewed: The Long Meadow by Vijay Seshadri. Graywolf Press, 2005. “Moving on to the next slide,” says Seshadri, in a put-on lecture about a genius painter done in by his own powers of self-abnegation: we can see, twisted and deliberately coarsened as it is, the exact same theme, revisited now with an ambition and gigantism [...]

Reviewed: Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, by Scott Donaldson. Columbia University Press, 2007. 553 pp., $34.95.  Edwin Arlington Robinson: Poems, selected and edited by Scott Donaldson. Everyman’s Library, 2007. 254 pp., $12.50.                               leave his verse To tell the story of the life he led. Let the man go: let the dead flesh be [...]

Reviewed: Louise Bogan.  Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950.  Henry Regnery Company:  Chicago, 1951.  Louise Bogan.  The Blue Estuaries:  Poems 1923-1968.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux:  New York, 1968.  Louise Bogan.  Journey Around My Room.  Ed. Ruth Limmer.  Penguin Books:  Middlesex, 1980.  Louise Bogan.  A Poet’s Alphabet:  Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation.  Ed. Robert Phelps [...]

William Logan’s sixth book of poems, whose binding falls apart on the second reading (shame on you, Penguin), sits atop a pile of even, well-turned work, and it’s worth recapitulating how he got here.  His début, Sad-faced Men (1982), was the notebook of a close observer nudging his findings toward the figurative without much overt [...]