<P>Cynthia Genser's landscapes, like those of D.H. Lawrence, are analogues of human emotions; her men and women exist in their effects-prototypes one minute, passionate and distinctly visible individuals the next. Person and place invite the reader into an adventure that begins and ends everywhere.</P><P>The language employed throughout is voluptuous, sensuous, yet precise. The appeal is to all the ...
<P>A parallax (the apparent displacement or change caused by the position of observation; alteration—Oxford English Dictionary) is a perception. The perspective here radically shifts from a person perceiving to a person interpreting. Maureen Mulhern builds on images: a fish twisting at the tail, the merciless rain, a cold translucent hand; and these images gather into a cyclical, fluid perception: «such complete light passing/Throu ...
<P>Continued is a selection of poems by Piotr Sommer, spanning his career to date. A kind of poetic utterance, these «talk poems» are devoid of any singsong quality yet faithfully preserve all the melodies and rhythms of colloquial speech. Events and objects of ordinary, everyday life are related and described by the speaker in a deliberately deadpan manner. Yet a closer look at the language he uses, with all its ironic inflections ...
<P><B>Winner of the National Book Award in Poetry (2004)</B></P><P>Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all ...
<P>Guillaume Apollinaire's final years exactly coincided with the clamorous advent of European Modernism and with the cataclysms of WWI. In The Self-Dismembered Man, poet Donald Revell offers new English translations of the most powerful poems Apollinaire wrote during those years: poems of nascent surrealism, of combat and of war-weariness. Here, too, is Apollinaire's last testament, «The Pretty Redhead,» a farewell to th ...
<P><B>Winner of the Strousse Award fro Best Group of Poems (2002)</B></P><P>In Rachel Zucker's re-imagining of the Greek myth, Persephone is a daughter struggling to become a woman. Unlike the classical portrait of a maiden kidnapped by a tyrant, Zucker's Persephone chooses to travel to the Underworld and assume her role as Hades' queen. Caught between worlds—li ...
<P>Offering both subtle and immediate pleasures, Lee Ann Brown's generous new book extends her unmistakable, original voice, every bit as Southern as it is avant-garde, gracious without being naive. Abounding in a playfulness of style, including songs and ballads, the poems in The Sleep That Changed Everything are by turns funny, serious, insightful and moving. Botanical and scientific language are used here as collage element ...
