About James Rother

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 [...]

Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) As Reviewed By: James Rother Just barely octogenarian (but grown wispy), Hugh Kenner, like the Romantic correspondent breeze he so adamantly eschewed in the prolonged swath through modernist studies he cut like a mighty wind, slipped away a year ago this past month, a legend diminished but certainly not obscured by the [...]

Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45. As Reviewed By: James Rother Three years ago the Collected Poems everyone was talking about was J. D. McClatchy’s James Merrill; last year it was Czeslaw Milosz’s; and in 2003, the duple bounty of Paul [...]

Interviewer’s Note: Poet and essayist Sherod Santos is the author of four books of poetry, Accidental Weather (Doubleday, 1982), The Southern Reaches (Wesleyan, 1989), The City of Women (W. W. Norton, 1993), and, most recently, The Pilot Star Elegies (W. W. Norton, 1999), which was both a National Book Award Finalist and one of five [...]

Until “poet, essayist, and naturalist” Diane Ackerman, the only celebrity from Waukegan, Illinois able to toss off jokes and fiddle off-key simultaneously was Jack Benny.