Reviewed: No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems by Bruce Taylor. Cormorant Books, 2011. There’s a marvelous description in Book X of Paradise Lost of the astronomical and climatological changes that accompany the Fall, and of the beginnings of predation among the animals.  Milton is more concerned there with the vast scales that the still new Copernican Cosmology had introduced, and with squaring that cosmology with Biblical narrative, than with animal suffering, but he does describe how,Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowle with Fowle,And Fish with Fish; to graze the Herb all leaving,Devourd each other; nor stood much in aweOf Man, but fled him, or with count’nance grimGlar’d on him passing…   (710-714)Milton, God love him, didn’t know the half of it. It [...]

Reviewed: Recollected Poems by Daryl Hine. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2009. 246 pages.& by Daryl Hine. Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2010. 112 pages. When Daryl Hine’s Recollected Poems was published in 2009 it marked something of a comeback for a poet who in the mid 1990s had turned his back on the publishing industry and begun posting his new poems on a website, through which he also accepted donations. It was hard, at least for those of us who have grown up in a book culture, not to see this as a comedown. A poet’s poet, and an unfashionable on at that, Hine had never been exactly famous, even by poetry standards. Still, he had published for decades with venerable houses like Athenaeum and Knopf, established himself as [...]

Reviewed: Broetry by Brian McGackin. Quirk Books, 2011. $12.95Broetry’s title jumps into a spot your mind didn’t know was there. Sure, you know “bros” and you know “poetry,” and it somehow seems more than natural for a book called Broetry to appear in your hands. And when it does appear, the first thing you notice is that, unlike nearly every other publication of poetry, Broetry is a real book. It’s a nicely sized (5×7.5) hardback with a beautifully embossed cover, a refreshing aesthetic relief from the common flimsy, perfect-bound books of poetry that must litter some unlucky remainder store.The cover includes a poem that riffs on William Carlos Williams:I have finishedthe beerthat was inthe icebox. . .forgive methis girl came overA riff that, perhaps unintentionally, [...]

(Editor’s Note: As it was announced today that Tomas Tranströmer had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the editors of the CPR thought it fitting to re-post this fine review of his work by Bill Coyle from 2009.)Reviewed: The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton. New Directions Books, 2006. Every year, as the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature approaches, partisans of the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer hold a collective breath, hoping against hope. A win for their man is unlikely for a number of reasons. One is the residual fallout from 1974 when the Swedish Academy gave the prize to two of its own members, Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson. Both were fine writers, but the appearance of [...]

Reviewed: Signs and Wonders by Charles Martin. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 74 pages.To publish a collection of new poems late in a distinguished career is a slightly anxious proposition, both for the poet and for readers. This is even more true when the previous book, nine years old now, was a “new and selected,” a gleaning of the best from previous books, along with a section of new work, looking like the summing up of a whole oeuvre. The anxious question is not, Can he still do it? As the poet’s interests shift, perhaps sharpening, perhaps deepening, we also want to know if he will still train his eye on the same matters that meant so much to us before.That at least was [...]

Reviewed: Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. 1st edition, 1938. 2nd edition, 1950. 3rd edition, 1960. 4th edition, 1976. What was the most important literature textbook of the 20th century? A work by two associate professors at Louisiana State University, it turns out, which went through four editions, and which made millions for them. Understanding Poetry—which by its second edition had already been adopted by over 250 colleges and universities—is one of the great landmarks in that rite of spring, or forced march, that we call the undergraduate survey course. For more than 40 years, hapless college freshman were assigned this tome (680 pages, minimum) as their one great rope to climb the unfamiliar crags of Parnassus; the radioactive-orange cover of the fourth [...]

Reviewed: Ziggurat by Peter Balakian. University of Chicago Press, 2010.Peter Balakian’s poetry is a “strange brew of wind and light” distilled to one degree or another from primal trauma. He’s as American as Walt Whitman and Joe Namath, a product of high school football teams in the affluent New Jersey suburbs, but he is not an optimist. As scholar and memoirist, Balakian has dug deep over the years into his rich Armenian past, and what he has found has darkened his sensibility. His poetry, like his highly acclaimed prose, reaches back to Armenian themes of trauma and genocide, just as it keeps a foot in the present with its own attendant terrors. Balakian has faced these things and written about them, directly or indirectly, through [...]

Reviewed: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan. Grove Press, 2011. 288 pages. $14.95.Kay Ryan’s pulling-herself-up-by-her-own-muddied-Blundstone-bootstraps-story is already the stuff of legend.  After writing and publishing poems for 20 years or so in relative obscurity, in this last decade she became the darling of Poetry Magazine, won a Guggenheim and the Ruth Lilly in 2004, was named United States Poet Laureate in 2008, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.  Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, she is popular and is a poetry “best seller” like Mary Oliver, with whom she has many things in common (style and subject matter not being two of them).  Both are read by people who don’t [...]

Reviewed: A City of Angels: A Verse Play in Three Acts by Ben Mazer. Cy Gist Press, 2011A 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 Mazer’s City of Angels never succeeds more than intermittently at any of these. One can sense, as if through the fog of the streets in which the play is set, a far better work, but too often, one feels that an early draft has been published that is still in need of a good gust of air to clear away the mist and make the story clearer.It’s not as if Mazer’s [...]

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 addressed to the speaker’s father, we find ourselves at the ailing father’s bedside and learn that he has a bedsore that has turned gangrenous:Doctors say that he could die: They have to hurry,might amputate. He nods, then the click of the door,and my father cries, he prays—but this is a hard story:Staph spreads, and surgeons treat his body like a quarry.Close to his spine, they mine the green-black ore—and still, [...]