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on A Murmuration of Starlings, poems by Jake Adam York
I remember the bulletin: An Eastern Airlines commuter prop-jet had crashed into Boston Harbor after take-off from Logan Airport, less than 10 miles from our house. I was 10-years old. A little research shows that the date was October 4, 1960; the accident occurred around 5:45 pm, and I would have been watching the six…
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on Classical Chinese Poetry, an anthology translated and edited by David Hinton
David Hinton is the most productive translator of Chinese literature and poetry in English of the past ten years. He is also one of the most accomplished of all time. When the New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry appeared in 2003, editor Eliot Weinberger focused on five major translators: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,…
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Poetry of Note: Books by Susan Settlemyre Williams, Robert Bly, and Norman S. Shapiro
on Ashes in Midair, poems by Susan Settlemyre Williams (Many Mountains Moving Press) Susan Williams’ poems are strange in the most humane and stimulating sense of the term, for they propose a fidelity to a world held in common as well as a need for uncommon expression. This is the voice of a fully developed…
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on The English Major, a novel by Jim Harrison
In a New York Times interview last year, Jim Harrison told Charles McGrath that he wrote The English Major at top speed – even though he rationed himself to one page per day. “My mind can’t stop running fictively,” he said, a comment not just about his continuous productivity. Prizing authenticity and the instinctive life,…
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on Give and Take, a novel by Stona Fitch (Concord Free Press – which is half the story)
Stona Fitch’ s second novel, Senseless, was published by Soho Press on September 11, 2001. Eliott Gast, an American trade representative, is taken hostage by terrorists and then methodically deprived of his five senses. His agony, monitored by cameras, is broadcast globally. The harrowing scenario may be the book’s subject, but the affecting content lies…
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on The Cosmopolitan, poems by Donna Stonecipher
Donna Stonecipher has published three books since 2002, each preoccupied with how the mind attempts to slip undetected through its own security screening and arrive at meaningful destinations. As tour directors of signification and its frustrations, her poems are both enactments and examples. Her main metaphor is travel – with all the displacement, amazement, certitude…
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on Bethlehem Steel: Builder and Arsenal of America, a history by Kenneth Warren
My father grew up in the Point, a blue-collar section of Quincy, MA situated adjacent to the Fore River Shipyard. The Bethlehem Steel Corporation acquired the shipyard in 1913 just as a European war approached. At its productive peak, the shipyard employed 32,000 people. As Kenneth Warren reports in Bethlehem Steel, “It was seen that…
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on Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam, edited by Kevin Platt
The arrival of new Mandelstam translations is an occasion to celebrate the solidity of the poem over the impermanence of the state. American professors who teach this lesson typically load up on theory and philosophy. But in Mandelstam’s world, the theorists – in both government and the arts – pose the lethal threat. Today we…
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on Writing in the Dark, essays by David Grossman
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on The Journal of Jules Renard, edited/translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget
For thirty years Louise Bogan worked intermittently on a “long prose piece,” a series of memoirs turned out into stories that “she hoped to publish one day as fiction,” as Elizabeth Frank writes in her biography of Bogan. “For a temperament like Louise Bogan’s, autobiography would have been more than an embarrassment: it would have…
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on Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place, essays edited by Elizabeth Willis
The great jazz pianist Hank Jones said the following about maintaining artistic control: “There is an extremely important prelude to improvising. Every tune you play has its correct tempo, and you have to find it. When you do, it practically plays itself. It’s not what you think it should be, it’s what the tune demands…
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on Causeway, poems by Elaine Sexton
Great poetry resolves in its form, but there is no great poetry without unresolved tension within. Perhaps this is obvious to everyone, since the necessity of tension sometimes inspires poets to make passable facsimiles. I prefer a book of poetry that makes tension its manifest or muffled topic. Or if the poet is more stubbornly…
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on Goldengrove, a novel by Francine Prose
Surveys show that men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market in North America and Britain. “The research is still in its early stages, but some studies have found that women have more sensitive mirror neurons than men,” reported Eric Weiner on NPR. “That might explain why women are drawn to works of…
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on Mute Objects of Expression by Francis Ponge, tr. by Lee Fahnestock (Archipelago Books)
The first official act of the German occupiers of France in 1940 was to move French time up by an hour to synchronize with Berlin time. My grandfather once described to me the sinister dark mornings of that first winter. The familiar warped by the unopposed unfamiliar, the ordinary made bizarre, the sense of feeling…
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on The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health, by Nena Baker
On August 15, the New York Times ran an AP wire story reporting that the FDA has reaffirmed its contention that “the trace amounts of bisphenol A that leach out of food containers were not a threat to infants or adults.” Had I not just completed my reading of Nena Baker’s new book, the broader…