RonSlate.com

on On A Day Like This, a novel by Peter Stamm, tr. by Michael Hofmann (Other Press)

Ron Slate — Sun, 11 May 2008 09:09:02 -0700

The protagonist of Peter Stamm’s fifth novel, On A Day Like This, is a forty-year old Swiss named Andreas who lives alone in Paris, teaches German at a suburban high school, and carries on a series of dispassionate affairs with women.

on Peace, a novel by Richard Bausch (Knopf)

Ron Slate — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:13:27 -0700

My father served in the Army Air Force as a B-17 ball-turret gunner, flying out of the airbase at Foggia, Italy, 50 miles northeast of Naples. The city had been taken by the Allies after the landing at Salerno in September 1943. There were 8,000 Allied casualties on the beach. He tells this story.

on Selected Poems: 1970-2005, by Floyd Skloot (Tupelo Press)

Ron Slate — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:29:13 -0700

Through a stroke of good fortune, I was in Portland, Oregon on April 20 when Paulann Petersen hosted an event to celebrate the publication of Floyd Skloot’s Selected Poems.

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow (Pantheon)

Ron Slate — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:34:02 -0700

My business partner knows a man who made a pre-season $150 bet that the New England Patriots would go undefeated right through the Superbowl. I believe the odds were 40,000 to 1. The Pats won every regular season and playoff game; if they win the Superbowl, the man takes away $6,000,000. Then, the man received a call from the president of the casino. The offer: $2,000,000 to cancel the bet.

on The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir by Sarah Manguso (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Ron Slate — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:51:37 -0700

As a Harvard undergraduate in 1995, Sarah Manguso contracted a neurological disease called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy or CDIF, though her illness was initially misdiagnosed. “My disease has two steps,” she writes. “The immune system secretes antibodies into the blood. Then the blood delivers the antibodies to the peripheral neurons.

on The Importance of Music to Girls, a memoir by Lavinia Greenlaw (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Ron Slate — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:17:38 -0700

I enrolled in ROTC in September, 1968, but I don’t remember why, or what it felt like to make that decision. All I can dredge up are scattered images. But the story is notorious among my family and friends who retell it, adding nuances and imputations along the way. Their narrative constitutes my memory.

Poet’s Bookshelf II (Barnwood Press), The Music Lover’s Anthology (Persea Books), and Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath Press)

Ron Slate — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:37:19 -0700

Poets Bookshelf II: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art, edited by Peter Davis and Tom Koontz (Barnwood Press)

on Creatures of a Day, poems by Reginald Gibbons (LSU Press)

Ron Slate — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:14:11 -0700

The eleven-part poem “Fern-Texts” that completes Reginald Gibbon’s eighth book of poems, Creatures of a Day, begins with a passage from the notebooks of Coleridge. This entry from 1804 describes “two sorts of talkative fellows”:

Twenty Poets Name Some New Favorites to Celebrate National Poetry Month

Ron Slate — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 07:21:17 -0700

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I asked some friends to recommend a new or recent poetry title for the site’s readership. Many thanks to everyone for naming some favorites. RS

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Where X Marks the Spot by Bill Zavatsky (Hanging Loose Press, 2006)
recommended by Michael Collier

on Another World Instead, early poems of William Stafford, edited by Fred Marchant (Graywolf Press)

Ron Slate — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:15:22 -0700

As an editor of a little magazine in the mid-1970s, I wrote to Bill Stafford asking if he would send some work. He responded with a batch of a dozen poems. Soon he became a regular contributor. The bulky packets would arrive a few times a year, and I would publish a poem or two. In 1977 I invited Stafford to Madison to read in the university’s poetry series.

on Circadian, poems by Joanna Klink (Penguin)

Ron Slate — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 10:03:38 -0700

I think I know what Dean Young means when he blurbs that Joanna Klink’s second book, Circadian, displays “a Dickinsonian desire for a meeting of minds and a reverence for the natural world.” Klink’s speaker is a rapt solitary, dominated by landscapes that intrude on the senses, who seeks not so much to be understood as not to be misunderstood.

Frank Sinatra: The Man, The Music, The Legend, essays edited by Jeanne Fuchs and Ruth Prigozy (Univ of Rochester Press)

Ron Slate — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:20:57 -0700

I was Berlin on business on May 14, 1998, the day Frank Sinatra died at age 82. The story topped the national news broadcast. Visiting Germany, President Clinton responded to a reporter’s question about Sinatra and America. Then Clinton went on to discuss new U.S. sanctions against India, which had just exploded a nuclear device underground.

on The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, poems by Marie Howe (Norton)

Ron Slate — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:25:10 -0700

Born in 1950, Marie Howe started writing poetry when she was thirty. In 1983 she earned an MFA from Columbia University, and in 1987 Persea Books published The Good Thief, her first book. The intensities of strapped-in emotion, signatures of her work over time, were already evident in those early poems, animated by the discovery that the materials of her life could inspire sure speech.

on The Soul Thief, a novel by Charles Baxter (Pantheon)

Ron Slate — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:11:14 -0800

“A great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction – from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little,” writes James Woods in How Fiction Works, to be published in the U.S. later this year.

on On Eloquence, by Denis Donoghue (Yale University Press)

Ron Slate — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:32:08 -0800

The term “eloquence” doesn’t offer much utility to literary critics these days.

New Poems, by Tadeusz Różewicz, translated by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books)

Ron Slate — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:40:18 -0800

Born in 1921, Tadeusz Różewicz was eighteen when Germany invaded Poland, the catastrophe that ended a briefly euphoric period of freedom for the Poles whose country had previously been partitioned for 150 years by Austrian, Russian and German rule. He fought in the underground in 1943-44. His brother was arrested and shot by the Gestapo.

on Earthly, poems by Erica Funkhouser (Houghton Mifflin)

Ron Slate — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:39:01 -0800

Asked why he wrote so few poems, William Meredith replied that “poetry and experience should have an exact ratio … Daily experience is astonishing on a level at which you can write a poem, but astonishing experience would be the experience which is not astonishment of reality but astonishment of insight.” Since the insights are rare, so are insightful poems.

on The Baseball Field at Night, last poems by Patricia Goedicke (Lost Horses Press)

Ron Slate — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:35:09 -0800

When I finally met Patricia Goedicke in 1982, after several years of correspondence, she had already been dealing with breast cancer for five years. She was exactly one year and a day younger than my mother, and there she sat at a table in a Cambridge restaurant, provoking and teasing, wanting to know everything, praising, laughing, a little flirty.

on About My Life and the Kept Woman, a memoir by John Rechy (Grove Press)

Ron Slate — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:56:33 -0800

The power and deceptions of identities, perceived and assumed, have long been preoccupations of John Rechy. Born in El Paso in 1934, he grew up in a segregated city where Latino families lived on one side of the tracks. His mother was Mexican.

on Poet in New York, poems by Federico García Lorca, tr. by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman (Grove Press)

Ron Slate — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:39:10 -0800

In the months and years after the murder of Americans and nationals in the destruction of the World Trade Center, poets Medina and Statman discovered in Lorca’s Poet in New York “the range of emotions we ourselves felt and images strangely reminiscent of the ones we witnessed on September 11 and its aftermath.” Soon after, they began collaborating on a new translation of Lorca’s m