Review: Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys
Note: The following is a review of D.A. Powell's Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press, 2012) by Casey McAlduff
In his most recent volume of poetry, Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys, D.A. Powell masterfully cultivates the paradox of growth as both a positive and negative transformative force. Here, growth is decay is achievement; is both pride and dismay. Riffing off of common parental advice, Powell uses the agricultural landscape of California's Central Valley (Useless Landscape) as well as the oath of the Boy Scouts (A Guide for Boys) to remind the reader that growth, in all of its forms, comes more often from trial and error than it does from success. - Post Continued
Continue ReadingA Hospital Odyssey by Gwyneth Lewis
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Denise Burch, friend of The International Poetry Library of San Francisco.
"R.S. Thomas- I can hear his voice-/ told me once that I should choose/ between fancy and imagination./ I know it's the latter that I revere..." muses Gwyneth Lewis during one of her narrative check-ins in A Hospital Odyssey. Indeed, Odyssey (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) is a wild, magical ride through Lewis's imagination: a truly epic poem that reads as a sort of Where the Wild Things Are for adults. Lewis's nimble prose leads us through this tale as we follow Maris, whose cancer-stricken husband Hardy is on his deathbed, on a dreamy adventure in search of healing and comprehension. - Post Continued
Continue ReadingLove, though for this you riddle me with darts
Just finished Daniel Mark Epstein’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Henry Holt, 2001). If you read one biography of a poet this year, make it this one! Epstein had access to diaries, journals, and letters housed in the Library of Congress and previously read by only 3 others, and he has turned this sizable hodge-podge of correspondence and reflections into a truly engrossing, powerful biography. To his advantage, Epstein was granted a rich array of sources from which to draw: Millay’s epistolary correspondence and, to a lesser degree, journal-keeping, was voluminous, and her life as brimming with scandal, success, and tragedy as any biographer could hope. Millay led the life we want to imagine all poets—especially those writing during the peak of bohemia in Greenwich Village—must lead: her biography provides a thrilling and voyeuristic window into her poetry, and we are all the richer for it. To Epstein’s immense credit, he presents Millay’s life through a biographer’s lens that allows the ecstasies in the poet’s life to soar to the heights of desire, passion, and artistic triumph that they were; delves into her low times without fear of denting his subject’s goddess-like pedestal; conjectures at motive without over-stepping the bounds of his sources; and throughout, weaves a mighty good yarn. - Post Continued
Continue ReadingSounding Out Matthea Harvey
I’ve been re-reading Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, and I found myself going back (and again) to a poem in the middle of the collection, “In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden.” I’ve always liked this poem, partly for the title (Harvey has a way with titles) and partly for the last line, which makes me laugh a little every time. On this read, I was thinking about the structure of the poem (specifically the lines and their breaks) and the relationship of the poem’s structure on the page to how it might be read out loud. - Post Continued
Continue ReadingInterrogating Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith
I was recently introduced to Patricia Smith’s collection, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008). Knowing little about Smith as a poet beyond her Def Poetry Jam appearances, I have to admit, I was at first somewhat skeptical. A whole book on Katrina? The concept had so much potential for triteness, for assumption and sweeping generality, for theft, for failure. And then I started to read… - Post Continued
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