The Poetry Shelf
MWBOOKREVW
THE POETRY SHELF
Sunlight and Stones
Thelma R. Hall
Shorter College Press
Box 476, Rome, GA 30165
0-9662255-0-3 $15.95 1-706-232-9325 1-706-235-2716 (fax)
Thelma Hall is Professor of English and Chair of the Division of Humanities at
Shorter College, Rome, Georgia. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals
and have received a number of well-deserved awards. Sunlight and Stones is a
collection that showcases her natural talent and well-honed abilities to
convert words on paper to images in the mind of the reader. The Winner: I hold
in my hand/the tooth of the tiger--/a bantering of minds/regressed to brute
force/and a brandishing of wills/until superior strength/declared me winner./I
don't recall the gaff and gouge,/the twist and pull of excising,/only the
beauty and power/of the final surge/and glaring teeth/that tore from me my
vital parts/but left the trophied hand.
Viper Rum
Mary Karr
New Directions
80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
0-8112-1382-X $19.95
The poems comprising Viper Rum tell us the story of Mary Karr's recurring bouts
of alcoholism while trying to raise a son, her fierce attachment to family and
friends, and her conversion to Catholicism. Her poems are intense, personal,
and richly rewarding. Mr. D. Refuses The Blessing: He Wanted to unscrew and
reorder/the stars to guide his lost beloved back./Instead, he shook his fist at
heaven./And like one of those willful boneheads/who backs a swiveling
truck/wildly the wrong way up the road,./To what should he bow his head, which
said/it was smartest of all? On the tall/library ladder, he pulled down first
one/heavy tome then another, but no book/ever raised him an inch. He did not
wish/to be lifted but to climb himself,/not to receive grace, but to shape
it/in his own clawed and hairy hands./Hence he died high in the stacks,/his
hand cobwebbed to the mystery shelf...
Ghost Radio
Dick Lourie
Hanging Loose Press
231 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
1-882413-48-2 $12.00 (pb) 1-882413-49-0 $20.00 (hc) 1-212-206-8465
Prin...@aol.com
Since 1968, Dick Lourie's poetry has appeared in such diverse publications as
Verse, Exquisite Corpse, The Massachusetts Review, ACM, Sun, and Ms. Magazine.
Ghost Radio is his seventh individual collection and both demonstrates and
documents his ability to sum up diverse fragments of the human experience with
a universal resonance. BHS: as teenagers we lived in the fifties/and thought a
great deal about the smell of our own breath/we admired Karen the cheerleader
and wished we were like her/or else we were in love with her secretly/and
jealous of Tommy the half-back who went out with her/then later even more
jealous of Bill the scholar who also went out with her/we ate lunch in a dark
wood booth every day thirty-eight years ago in the luncheonette that isn't
there anymore of course:/too much ketchup on the french firs/Buddy kept
insisting we always ate there with the same few friends/who now have
disappeared into the rest of New Jersey.
13 Los Angeles Poets
Jack Grapes, editor
Bombshelter Press
6684 Colgate Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90048
0-941017-47-8 $13.95 1-213-651-5488 1-213-651-5132 (fax)
Los Angeles is a city of facade, of sunlight and shadow, a world of ambiguity
that heightens desire and distorts memory. From this psychic desert, this
cul-de-sac of trendy existentialism, the thirteen poets in this anthology watch
the widening fault lines of the American landscape where memory disengages
itself from history. The poets showcased in this remarkable collection include:
Kathleen Zeisler Goldman; Stephanie Hager; Diana Jean; Mifanwy Kaiser;
Stellasue Lee; Priscilla Lepera; Elaine Mintzer; Gilla Nissan; James O'Hern;
Jan Ruckert; Patricia L. Scruggs; Jeremy Stuart; and Terry Stevenson. Full
Circle: My Daughter, pregnant/has lost the hollows/in her cheekbones,/gained
breasts and hips./She carries/her stomach/before her, proudly,/the way she
carried/her pot belly/when she/was a toddler.
Scars of Light
Beth Goobie
NeWest Press
Box 60632, University of Alberta Outlet, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2S8
0-920897-73-8 $13.95 1-403-492-4428 1-403-492-4099 (fax)
In Scars Of Light, Beth Goobie offers the reader fifty-two brilliant exercises
in the rich, beautiful, intense, complex, mesmerizing, memorable language of
poetry. Eight, Before Definition: truth felt like canned peaches/on the
tongue/the years i was eight/and the yellow forsythia bush/bloomed in the black
and white/year round front porch/family photograph/on the kitchen mantle/next
to the faded box/of trust and obey verses./autumn was the sound/of spirits
dragging their claws/across the earth,/and the smell of leaves/piled under the
maples,/their whirling orange red tears/falling, falling./i did not know,
then,/that one brother/pulled out his heart/and let it go in the
wind,/believing it would grow back/in the spring./the rest of us kept ours/in
bibles/like bookmarks,/waiting for meaning/to begin.
No Matter How Good the Light Is: Poems by a Painter
Edward Boccia
Time Being Books
10411 Clayton Road, Suites 201-203, Saint Louis, MO 63131
1-56809-045-5 $12.50 (pb) 1-56809-044-7 $18.95 (hc) 1-314-432-1771
In the three sections of this book of poems, Edward Boccia leads us into the
inner world of the creative mind. An accomplished poet and painter, he
describes the analogy between these two forms of expression. In "Discovery",
the painter-as-poet sees art in everything. He looks at the entire world of
things, and even the spaces between things, and finds aesthetic significance in
both the complex and the simple. He urges us to drop our preconceptions of what
art is and isn't. In the "Reflections" section, Boccia explores the relation
between the shapes of things and the shapes of the human body, how we ourselves
are made up of certain nonhuman forms, such as sphere, cone, and cube. We see
that we are flesh and bone primarily in spirit but that we are visually
geometric. Finally, in "The Blind Artist", we are inside the mind of the
painter. We see how he sees and are privy to his interpretations of what he
sees. The artist here is "blind" to the ephemeral, changing nature of
appearances, but not to the joy and grief of reality; he is blind in that he
sees through his eyes, not merely with them. Swallowing Red: Placated by the
simple red color/of an unsuspecting apple,/I petition space to make way,/and I
say,/He who bites the apple/wounds its color;/he who swallows red/prepares for
the life of an artist.
Noon
Cole Swensen
Sun & Moon Press
6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
1-55713-287-9 $10.95 1-213-857-1115 1-213-857-0143 http://www.sunmoon.com
Winner of the 1995 New American Poetry Series competition, Cole Swensen's Noon
is a stunning meditative mix of lyrical and prosaic poetry in constant motion.
Swensen turns and returns images from our external world while exploring a
spiritual landscape marked by separation and the desire for reunion. A
professor at the the University of Denver in Colorado and author of several
previous books of outstanding poetry (including Given, New Math, and Numem),
Swensen is an accomplished and polished poet as Noon so eloquently documents.
Nine grey trees compose a single move./Walking unravels the muscle that
connects/the earth to bone,/features it out like a braid unskeined,/the leaves
never fall straight down, even/when you think not one bit of air is moving./You
can hear it too, but the seeing/is more convincing.
Worlds Interpenetrating & Apart: Collected Poems 1959-1996
William Irwin Thompson
Lindisfarne Books
3390 Route 9, Hudson, NY 12534-9420
0-940262-72-X $17.95 1-518-851-9155 1-518-851-2047 (fax)
http://www.lindisfarne.org
Worlds Interpenetrating & Apart is an outstanding collection of poems written
over thirty-five years and presents a remarkable range of work by William Irwin
Thompson, winner of the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. From
the personal and lyrical, through the narrative and mythological, to the
scientific and cosmological, these poems trace many of the major themes that
have affected contemporary culture over the past four decades. I Dreamt Before
Creation: I dreamt before Creation/was shuddering off the dark,/that Nothing
like a great machine/screamed increasingly to sound./Then light: hot, liquid,
white,/casting out mimetic stars/immaculated all the void./In dream and this
late eon lay/my body the detritus of/some broken incontinent god./I, awakening
out of sleep,/turned back mumbling into sleep./Wet galaxies upon the
sheets/were furious by themselves.
Save Twilight: Selected Poems
Julio Cortazar
City Lights Publishers
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
0-87286-333-6 $12.95 1-415-362-1901 1-415-362-4921 (fax0
World renowned as one of the masters of modern fiction, Julio Cortazar was also
a prolific poet, who in his final months in Paris, ill with leukemia, assembled
what he wanted saved of his life's work in verse. Save Twilight is a
distillation of that collection, a survey of Cortazar's poetry (ably translated
from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler) ranging through his various vices, moods
and styles. From free verse to fixed forms, the intimately lyrical to the
social-historical, Cortazar is revealed as virtuoso stylist and a poet of
intense personal mission, and a subverter of genres in his playful approach to
the book as a literary artifact. "Le Dome": This keepsake you've bequeathed me,
a face among mirrors and dirty saucers,/contributes to my suspicion that the
universe isn't perfect./The awkwardness of our last our together/that the
certainty that the sun is poisoned,/that inside very grain of wheat a deadly
weapon trembles--/when it all should have come clear, in a silence/where
nothing would have been left unsaid./But that's not how it was, and we
parted/the way we deserved to, really, in a filthy cafe./Surrounded by ghosts
and cigarette butts,/mixing our pitiful kisses with night's undertow.
Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth
Penny Harter
Sherman Asher Publishing
PO Box 2853, Santa Fe, NM 87504-2853
1-890932-02-7 $14.00 1-505-984-2686 1-505-820-2744 (fax)
http://www.shermanasher.com
Penny Harter's ecological poems comprising Lizard Light celebrates our sacred
physical connection to the planet, and offers us a path not of ownership, but
kinship, as part of the breathing world of ravens, rocks and constellations.
The Serengetti Plains: Death does not feed these plains/below the star that
burns/in the herds that graze here./Light becomes leaves/in the mouth of a
zebra;/shines in the flesh of/antelope and elephant,/rhino and
giraffe;/flickers in the cheetah and lion,/leopard and hyena as they stalk/leap
and eat, their strong teeth/ripping still-warm flesh./When blood runs into th
grass/it s not death that seeps/into this soil, but starlight/on its journey
through the dark.
All of What We Loved
William Bronk
Talisman House, Publishers
PO Box 3157, Jersey City, NJ 07303-3157
1-883689-65-1 $13.95 (pb) 1-883689-66-X $33.95 (hc) 1-800-243-0138
Winner of the American Book Award for his collected poems, William Bronk is one
of this country's most visible and respected poets. All Of What We Loved
includes some of his most skillful and profound work. Bronk's work is always
well received, but this powerful collection will have an especially strong
reception by his many fans. Migrants: Having come, some of us, a long way/we
are told, by gestures really, more than words/and by the total freedom of the
place,/to make ourselves at home. In the courtyard then/or in the gardens and
the countryside around/we do as we were told and settle down/quite comfortably
and in good order. But by/that order, by pride or by humility /by even the
force of love,/none of us/is ever admitted to the house or knows/if anyone is
really living there/or if the place we came to is any place.
Hunter--Gatherer
R.T. Smith
Livingston University Press
Station 22, Livingston University, Livingston, AL 35470
0-942979-34-6 $9.95 1-205-652-9661
R.T. Smith's poems and their vision of nature have impressed readers for many
years. in Hunter--Gatherer he has so honed that vision that even the palest of
urbanites might appreciate the philosophy his poems so eloquently espouse. In
this collection are themes of American history and biography, Irish poems, and
commentaries on the human comedy that is life. The Uses of Enchantment:
Thinking of sorcery, I imagine Merlin/as the oak yearning to speak.
Locked/between bark and heartwood, spellbound/by the ravishing apprentice, he
must have/felt some regret over the lore he/gave her, the passion and craft. It
was/ love that struck him blind. How/he could not fail to see that Vivian
wore/snakes as bracelets, the dragon's amulet/in her eyes. How he opened his
Druid/heart. How she pantomimed pleasure/and lied for his secrets./What was the
riddle she asked? I have to wonder/why his answer doomed him to trance./I
imagine the wizard immobile,a bare/tree with ravens. How they roosted/in his
branches and limed his trunk,/their cold voices withering his roots/like
winter. How his tongue strained/toward words to lament youth';s
devoted/cruelty, yet how every syllable he/gave the wind still praised her
beauty,/how closely his pain resembled joy,/though the tree, if it could
speak,/would surely testify, pain is never joy.
Carrying Knowledge Up A Palm Tree
Taban Io Liyong
Africa World Press Inc.
11-D Princess Road, Lawrenceville, NJ 08648
0-86543-594-4 $12.95 1-609-844-9583 1-609-844-0198 (fax)
Taban Io Liyong was born in the Sudan and raised in Uganda. He was education at
Howard University, Honors Program, and is a graduate of the University of Iowa
Writers Workshop. A prolific writer of poetry, fiction, literary and cultural
criticism, Liyong has the wide and deep educational background and sharp
intellect to see clearly and comment succinctly on what has been going on in
Africa within the last fifty years. Io Liyong has the ability to use poetry as
a tool of appraisal through personal and communal introspection. The price of
plaiting curly hair I do not know;/The price of roasting crinkly hair I do not
know;/The price of straightening wrinkled hair I do not know,/But this I do
know: durra costs twenty dollars a kilo in Juba./The price of a bottle of beer
I do not know;/The price of a tot of whisky I do not know;/The price of a glass
of wine I do not know,/But this I know: a sack of charcoal costs forty dollars
in Juba./The price of Benson and Hedges I do not know;/The price of meerschaum
clay pipe I do not know;/The price of Ronson Cigarette Lighter I do not
know./But this I know: a sack of sugar costs forty dollars in Juba./The price
of deodorant I do not know;/The price of manicuring fingers I do not know;/The
price of psychiatric help I do not know./But his I know: a kilo of wheat flour
costs twenty dollars in Juba./The price of bullets I do not know;/The price of
Klashnikov I do not know;/The price of antipersonnel land mines I do not
know;/But this I know: funeral rites cost one thousand dollars in Juba/That is,
if you can find the body.
The Other Hemisphere
Jan Kemp
Three Continents Press
1901 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20006
0-89410-717-8 $10.00 (pb) 0-89410-716-X $TBA (hc)
Jan Kemp has been an expatriate New Zealander for the past ten years. Following
the South Pacific Festival of Arts in 1980, she stayed on in Papua, New Guinea,
teaching at the university. Since then, she has taught at the Universities of
Hong Kong & East Asia at Macau. At present she is a lecturer in the English
Language Proficiency Unit at the National University of Singapore. Kemp's
previous publications include two volumes of poems, Against the Softness of
Woman (Caveman Press, 1976) and Diamonds and Gravel (Hampson Hunt, 1979), and
two pamphlets, Ice-breaker Poems (Coal-Black Press, 1980) and Five Poems (Arte
& Materia, 1988). She has contributed to numerous anthologies, including An
Anthology of 20th Century New Zealand Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1987).
She has also written short stories which have appeared in New Women's Fiction
(New Women's Press, 1968 and 1988), The Penguin Book of Contemporary New
Zealand Short Stories (Penguin, 1989) and other anthologies. She was awarded a
PEN-Stout Fellowship at Victoria University of Wellington in 1991. Jan Kemp
possesses a rare and articulate gift which shines through all her published
writings. The poems in The Other Hemisphere use images from Europe, Asia, and
the Pacific showcasing a true poetic talent and a uniquely articulate voice.
Suttee: All this love flaming from me,/as if angel voices lit me,/I am dying
for,/white song, white pyre,/white piercing the shrieked air./In my widow's
burning robes,/I go, to breathe/only as the sky,/inhaling emptiness; my
thoughts,/angeluses of the way's weather/become songs of imagination's heat,/My
floating body now is husbanded/by the poems of my lie,/my earthen self,
white-ashed,/no more to be made wife.
Poetry After Modernism
Robert McDowell, editor
Story Line Press
PO Box 1108, Ashland, OR 97520-0052
1-885266-34-0 $17.95 1-541-512-8792 1-541-512-8793 (fax)
Now in a newly revised and expanded edition, Poetry After Modernism is a
superb collection of informative, challenging, and insightful essays on modern
and contemporary poetry of the twentieth century by poets about poetry.
Contributors include Bruce Bawer, Kelly Cherry, Rita Dove, Lynn Emanuel,
Frederick Feirstein, Dana Gioia, Jonathan Holden, Mark Jarman, Paul Lake,
Michel Lind, Robert McDowell, Marilyn Nelson, Carole Oles, Hilda Raz, Meg
Schoerke, and Frederick Turner. Poetry After Modernism touches on all the key
sectors of modern poetry from feminist to African-American, academia to
business, religious to metaphysical. Poetry After Modernism is highly
recommended for poetry studies curriculum and supplemental reading lists.
From The Devotions
Carl Phillips
Graywolf Press
2401 University Avenue, Suite 203, Saint Paul, MN 55114
1-55597-263-2 $12.95 1-800-283-3572
With From The Devotions, the poetry of Carl Phillips speaks to a balance
between decorum and pain, devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without
the comforting gods or the organized structures of revealed truth. Neither sage
nor saint nor prophet, the poet is the listener, the mourner, the one who has
some access to the maddening quarters of human consciousness, the wry Sibyl.
From The Devotions is deeply felt poetry, highly intelligent, and
unsentimental, and confirms Phillips' reputation as a poet of enormous talent
and depth. In the Borghese Gardens: The sad Roman emperors were not the
many/who had themselves declared gods,/but the others,/the few who really
believed it./It is the same thing, you tell me, with love./How every once in a
while,/when a man of small frame feeds the birds,/or loves flowers,/He is
crazy, we say, bored;/or we are bored, and we say Look,/there's a saint, and
move on./We keep walking because the park is still lovely,/the swans are,/the
hungry way they tear at their food/like it's history, or the heart, and not
bread.
Boy in the Key of E
Edward Foster
Goats & Compasses, Publishers
PO Box 524, Brownsville, VT 05037
0-942433-76-9 $10.00
Edward Foster is the author of several critical and biographical studies, as
well as books and chapbooks of poetry including The Space Between Her Bed and
Clock (1993), The Understanding (1994), All Acts are Simply Acts (1995), and
Adrian as Song (1997). His poetry has appeared in such journals as American
Letters and Commentary, Bombay Gin, Five Fingers Review, First Intensity, River
City, Poetry New York, Boston Book Review, Boxkite, and Sub Voicive Poetry. Boy
in the Key of E is his most recent chapbook and continues to demonstrate and
document a uniquely American voice abroad in the world. The Parallel Boy: You
list to the left, vote/for the first time in years,/please your mother,
and/regarding your shape in the mirror,/release gardenias into the
air./Elegant, sweet, permanent/joy -- how do you know what/you wish? Where is
the/parallel boy, the little white tiger/in knickers and spats who came/and
delivered his lessons/before you entered the world?/You are sweet, said the
tiger:/envelop my grace with your/arms. Bear me away:/take me up to the roof,
and/examine my teeth in the sun./In the booth the people/I speak of will
vote/and continue to vote,/and I am the carrion boy,/and up on the roof/are the
angels and I/and all of them/do as I say.
The Classic Hundred Poems
William Harmon, Alice Quinn, Cindee Scott, editors
Columbia University Press
562 West 113th Street, New York, NY 10025
0-231-10974-1 $175.00 1-800-944-8648 http://columbia.edu/cu/cup
The Classic Hundred Poems in this superb computer cd-rom format features new
audio performances recorded for the this cd-rom, and over 150 illustrations of
documentary interest, such as the painting that inspired Yeats' Lead and the
Swan, or the engravings etched by William Blake to illustrate his own poems.
Each poem offers a wealth of information for reading, viewing, and listening
including clearly written introductions, critical and technical notes, visual
portraits and biographies of the poets, and bibliographies for further reading.
Each poem includes an introduction, an audio performance, critical and
technical notes, the poet's biography, a visual portrait of the poet, paintings
and illustrations, and a bibliography. Also provided are notes on where the
poem was written, who is speaking in the poem, what is happening in the poem,
historical and geographical information. A timeline and maps are provided
showing where and when the poets wrote, where they lived, and the places they
wrote about. The lives and the works of the poets are brought instantly to life
as only a multimedia cd-rom format can provide. Highly recommended.
The Critical Poem: Borges, Paz, and Other Language-Centered Poets in Latin
America
Thorpe Running
Bucknell University Press
Lewisburg, PA 17837
0-8387-5319-1 $32.50
The "critical poem", a term that Octavio Paz borrows from Stephane Mallarme,
explains a poetry that is self-conscious about its inability to say what it
means. This concept, which also parallels concerns central to
post-structuralist theory, both underlies and informs the work of eight
important Latin American poets, spanning three generations. These eight are
Octavio Paz (1914) and David Huerta (1949) from Mexico; Jorge Luis Borges
(1899-1986), Robert Juarroz (1925), Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72), and Alberto
Girror (1919-91) from Argentina; Juan Luis Martinez (1947-93) and Gonzalo
Millan (1947) from Chile. The anguish and tension that result from their
complete distrust of language leads these poets to an ironic but imaginative
perspective on their own writing. Thorpe Running is professor of Spanish in the
Department of Modern and Classical Languages at St. John's University and the
College of St. Benedict in Minnesota.
The Edwin Mellen Press
PO Box 450, Lewiston, NY 14092-0450
$14.95 each 1-716-754-2788 1-716-754-1860 (fax)
The Edwin Mellen Press is perhaps this country's most impressive,
non-university affiliated, scholarly publishing house. One of its imprints is
the Mellen Poetry Press, and is dedicated to publishing work that is simply
outstanding, both in terms of the individual poets and the themes that have
universally resonate across all manner of boundaries, cultures, times, places,
and generations. In memorium and commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of he
more horrific aspects of the nuclear age as exemplified by the use of the first
nuclear weapon used in war (Hiroshima, August 6, 1945), the Mellen Poetry Press
has published thirteen volumes of poetry dedicated to the subject. Each volume
showcases the work of a different poet. These poets include Sharon Stidfole
Sorlie's Awakened To Dreams (2815-1); Jamie Parsley's The Cloud: A Poem In 2
Acts (2823-2); Toby Lurie's Hiroshima: A Symphony (2817-8); Wayne Lanter's At
Float On The Ohta-Gawa (2838-0); Albert W. Hartkorn's Hiroshima Testament
2813-5); I. Forshaw's The Excuse (2848-8); Paul A. De Ritis' Hiroshima Poems
(2807-0); Grace Cluster's The Heart Of Hiroshima (2850-X); Ricahrd J. Schoeck's
My Hiroshima (2846-1); Lindsay S. Amoss' Hiroshima (2809-7); Cyril Christo's
Hiroshima, My Love(2819-4); Snowdon Barnett's Hiroshima Hypostasis (2811-9);
James Sutton's The Last Samurai (2828-3). Two qualities bind these thirteen
disparate poets: the subject of Hiroshima and their talent for expressing in
narrative poetry the multiple depths and textures of the human experiences that
arose from it. These are timeless works that will speak to our children and our
children's children, echoing down through generations yet unborn -- for such is
the power of these words, written on paper and spoken in our hearts. Fitting
testimonials to the horrors of nuclear war and our aspiring hopes the emerged
from those nuclear ashes.
Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh
Theo Dorgan, editor
Four Courts Press/ISBS, dist.
5804 N.E. Hassalo Street, Portland, OR 97213-3644
1-85182-239-9 $35.00 1-503-287-3093 1-503-280-8832 (fax)
Irish poetry, in both Gaelic and English, has undergone a series of convulsive
shifts since the mid-century. Commentators and poets alike are aware of a
renaissance of great scope, a plural poetry at once deep-ranging and
intelligently ambitious. Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh surveys the new terrain
with authority, insight and grace. In addition to an informative introduction
by Theo Dorgan, the essays in this outstanding volume include Augustine
Martihn's Kavanagh and After: An Ambiguous Legacy; Gerald Dawe's The European
Modernists: MacGreevy, Develin and Coffey; Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith's Modern
Poetry in Irish, 1940-1970; Edna Longley's Out of Ulster 1: Louis MacNeice and
His Influence; Terence Brown's Out of Ulster 2: Heaney, Montague, Mahon and
Longley; Anthony Roche's Platforms: The Journals, The Publishers; Alan Titley's
Innti and Onward: The New Poetry in Irish; Eamon Grennan's American Relations;
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's The Hidden Ireland: Women's Inheritance; John Goodby's
New Wave 1: 'A Rising Tid', Irish Poetry in the 60s; Eavan Boland's New Wave 2:
Born in the 50s, Irish Poets of the Global Village; and Theo Dorgan's Looking
over the Edge.
Classic 100 Poems
William Harmon, Editor
Highbridge
1-56511-249-0 $29.95
A consensus of over 1,000 compilers is reached in this fine audio anthology
which gathers the 'best' poems of all time. Classic 100 Poems has been newly
revised and is read by an ensemble of contemporary poets, providing a treasure
trove of poetry basics for both students and adult enthusiasts of the genre.
Poet's Choice
Robert Haas
Ecco Press
0-88001-566-7 $23.00
As Poet Laureat, Hass asked himself what a poet laureate could usefully
achieve. His answer: to bring back the popular 19th-century tradition of
including poetry in daily newspapers. This represents his personal selection of
winners for a nationally syndicated column, presenting two years of his choices
of modern and traditional poems alike. A diverse, winning collection.
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