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on Myself Painting, poems by Clarence Major (LSU Press), and Present Vanishing, poems by Dick Allen (Sarabande Books)
There’s something elusive about all great poems, but some are especially keen on making us sense the shadowy or darting presence of an experiencing mind that aspires to be regarded as capable of implying a sort of meaning. By “elusive” I don’t necessarily mean “obscure.” Yet also, there’s something urgently present about all great poems,…
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on He Is … I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond, by David Wild
Until this week I hadn’t watched Martin Scorcese’s The Last Waltz (1978) for fifteen years. Centering on the final concert of The Band in 1976 at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, the film also includes appearances by Bob Dylan, Paul Butterfield, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Ronnie Hawkins – and Neil…
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on Songbook: Selected Poems of Umberto Saba, translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan
Although he published his first book of poetry in 1911, Umberto Saba (1883-1957) did not receive a major Italian literary award until 1946, the Viareggio Prize. He was a modern poet ill-equipped to channel his sensibilities through the prevailing modernisms. Where Montale, Ungaretti and Pavese escaped from personality, Saba turned his ear back to Leopardi…
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on The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation, by Frederic Spotts
“Everything we did was equivocal. We never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong. A subtle poison corrupted even our best actions.” This was Sartre’s incisive post-war assessment of the behavior of French artists and intellectuals during the German occupation of 1940-1944. At the beginning of the war, Paris was the unrivaled cultural…
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on A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East, by Patrick Tyler
As the Obama administration prepares to take the reins of American foreign policy, one wonders not only if and how the new president will depart from George W. Bush’s inert approach to the Israeli-Palestinian debacle, but also how Obama’s advisers (often recycled Clintonites) regard the ambitious but failed policies of Bill Clinton and the 1993…
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on The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, essays by Lewis Buzbee
On returning to Massachusetts in 1978 from graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, I entertained the idea of opening a bookstore. I made an appointment to visit the venerable publisher David Godine through a mutual acquaintance. “You’d have to be nuts,” he said, predicting lean times for independent bookstores. At that time the B.…
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on Satin Cash, poems by Lisa Russ Spaar
The signature gesture of Lisa Spaar’s third book, Satin Cash, is a shift of attention from circumstance to displaced reaction. A disinclination to be quite on top of actual things triggers a self-in-language, cloistered in memory and reconsideration, and making its way back to the actual through strangely routed observation and phrasing. THE ICE…
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on The Journey, a novel by H.G. Adler, translated by Peter Filkins
H. G. Adler’s The Journey begins with a three-page “Augury.” When Peter Filkins discovered a copy of Die Reise in Schoenhof's Foreign Language Bookstore in Harvard Square in 2002, he read the introductory paragraph and immediately determined to translate the novel: “Driven forth, certainly, yet without understanding, man is subjected to a fate that at…
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on The Writer as Migrant, essays by Ha Jin
Ha Jin would seem to have every reason to feel securely anchored in his adopted American home. He arrived from China in 1985 as a twenty-nine year old student of American literature to pursue graduate studies at Brandeis University. Just five years later, his first book of poetry, Between Silences, was published. In the post-Tiananmen…
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on The Likes of Us: America in the Eyes of the Farm Security Administration, by Stu Cohen and Peter Bacon Hales
In the late 1960s, the Boston-based art and cultural critic Stu Cohen became interested in the contemporary photography of Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. “Photographers like these declared their lineage,” writes Peter Bacon Hales, “to Robert Frank in the ‘50s, to the Farm Security Administration photographers of the ‘30s and early ‘40s, to…
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on The Romantic Dogs, poems by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy
Borges, Cortázar, Bolaño. With the recent publication of Bolaño’s novels in English, the Anglophone critics now generally concur with their Hispanic colleagues: Bolaño, who died in 2003 in Catalonia, is the greatest novelist of his foreshortened generation, supplementing the imaginative portfolio of Borges (versus the magical realism of García Márquez). The fourth of his nine…
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on The Odor of Sanctity, poems by Michael Heffernan
NIGHTFALL What have I done? I said to my own self. Who have I come to be? I said again. My own self answered me in her own words. She told me things I could not understand. She watched my eyes move when she told me this. They watched a bird go over the blue…
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on The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet, by David Okefuna
“A phenomenon of such extended malignance as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age,” wrote Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower (1962). The two decades preceding the war still provoke historians to ask why a period of such innovation and productivity led to unprecedented mass violence. “Today, the period before the…
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on Selected Poems of Friederich Hölderlin, translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover
Friederich Hölderlin wrote almost all of his complete work between 1796 and 1803 including odes, elegies, hymns, the epistolary novel Hyperion, the verse tragedy Empedokles, and translations of Pindar. Over the following four years as his mental stability collapsed, he wrote several poetic fragments. One begins: Once I asked the muse, and she Replied:…
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on Hotter Than That: The Trumpet, Jazz, and American Culture, by Krin Gabbard
“Sometimes I feel the need for metallic sounds; in jazz you can hear knives singing. Knives rip up the psyche’s fabric to shreds and strengthen it in the process,” wrote the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski in Another Beauty. The trumpet has shredded without peers since the first ancient call to arms. Two trumpets buried with…