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Dennis O’Driscoll (1954-2012): An Appreciation
Until recently, Dennis O’Driscoll was among the few living poets I most wanted to meet. He was also the only such poet whose writings I barely knew.… continue reading...
Author: Sunil Iyengar
“Sleeping in a Hobo Jungle Can Be a Dangerous Thing”: A Conversation with Richard Wilbur
More than half a century has elapsed since Richard Wilbur, still prolific at 87, won his first Pulitzer Prize. The extraordinary qualities of that statement should be highlighted for readers who claim there are no incontrovertible giants on the American poetry scene.… continue reading...
Tom Disch: Work Ethicist of American Poetry
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
“A spiritual life doesn’t require taking Holy Orders, only a decision to submit to a lifelong discipline.”
— Thomas M. Disch, 1940-2008
Few American poet-critics since Edgar Allan Poe have brought a practitioner’s knowledge of writing genre fiction to the service of poetry reviewing.… continue reading...
Louis MacNeice: “His Own Unchanging Self”
An Interview with Jon Stallworthy
Interview By: Sunil Iyengar
Jon Stallworthy’s blood quickened after a poetry reading he gave earlier this year, not because he admired his own recitative powers, but because of something an audience member told him.… continue reading...
The Other Wiman
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Long Home by Christian Wiman. Story Line Press, 1998.
Hard Night by Christian Wiman. Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
When the mantle of Poetry editor descended on the 37-year-old Christian Wiman in 2003, many a poet-critic burned with envy.… continue reading...
Pounding the Catalogue
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
A Review of “Ezra Pound in His Time and Beyond: The Influence of Ezra Pound on Twentieth-Century Poetry.” Special Collections Exhibit, University of Delaware Library, curated by Jesse Rossa; catalogue published by the University of Delaware Library.… continue reading...
Resistance and “Sweet Traction”: Heaney as a Poet of the Underground
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Read “District and Circle” here at The Times Online
Seamus Heaney has become so institutionalized that it is virtually impossible for him ever to reclaim outsider status.… continue reading...
A Further Range
Robert Frost’s two-and-a-half year sojourn in England (1912-1915) made him as a poet. After a long apprenticeship in New Hampshire, he placed his first book, A Boy’s Will, with a London publisher, thrilled the Georgian poets with his rustic New England facade, met W.… continue reading...
Confidence Artist
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. 71 pages.
The trick of transparency, like all sleight of hand, does not admit close scrutiny.… continue reading...
The Civilized Yawp
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Fourteen On Form: Conversations with Poets by William Baer. University Press of Mississippi. 265 pages.
The liveliest moment in William Baer’s collection of table-talk occurs in an interview with Douglas Dunn at St.… continue reading...
Justice’s Sentimental Journey
In Memoriam: Donald Justice (1925-2004)
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
I
Thumbing at leisure through Donald Justice’s poems, one encounters several worthy candidates for an imagined memorial reading.… continue reading...
Tricks to Set the River On Fire: Feigned Eloquence in Lowell
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
The Yellow Pages of Poetry: Notes on the New Norton
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Third Edition), edited by Jahan Ramazani.
… continue reading...Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free;
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all th’adulteries of art.
Tricks to Set the River On Fire: Feigned Eloquence in Lowell
Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. 1181 pages. $45.
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Dana Gioia’s Defenders of the Modernist-Romantic Tradition
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
Can Poetry Matter? by Dana Gioia. 10th anniversary edition. Graywolf Press, 2003.
I.
In an introductory note to his first poetry collection, The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940), Randall Jarrell declares: “‘Modern’ poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become.”… continue reading...
Designed for a Lifetime of Becoming: The Poetic Debut of Adam Kirsch
As Reviewed By: Sunil Iyengar
The Thousand Wells by Adam Kirsch. Ivan R. Dee, 2002. $18.95.
… continue reading...“It is very likely that the really vital poetry of the next generation will be not about God at all–the poets who currently treat that theme often descend into banality or obscurity–but about other profound and secular themes: love, marriage, loneliness, aging, death.”
