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on The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões, translated by Landeg White
In “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” William Wordsworth honored the great practitioners of the form: “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody / Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound; / a thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; / with it Camöens soothed an exile’s grief …” Then he added…
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on Minding the Store: Great Writing About Business, edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
In 2000, The Institute of Economic Affairs, a British think tank of free-marketeers, published "The Representation of Business in English Literature," a paper covering literature from the eighteenth century to the present. The final chapter by Dr. John Morris, subtitled “An Unprecedented Moral Quagmire,” begins, “It is difficult to find positive and appreciative images of…
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on Why Poetry Matters by Jay Parini
“I would say it is not our business to defend poetry,” wrote Robert Francis, “but the business of poetry to defend us.” He had been referring to a poet who “defended poetry as he would have defended womanhood on the highway at night … I would say that a poem worth defending needs no defense…
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on Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck
The novels of Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia rest side by side on the shelf of my local library. Moravia’s books are more numerous (he wrote more than 30 novels); Morante’s are thicker (she wrote four). Neither author is seeing much action. Moravia regarded his wife Elsa as the greatest novelist of their generation, and…
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on Theories of Falling, poems by Sandra Beasley
“What we call Life is the scattered attempt to get even with those who ‘misunderstood’ us in childhood,” scribbled Ned Rorem in his diary, published as An Absolute Gift. “What we call Art is the disciplined attempt to get even.” This hyperbolic zinger seems especially to pertain to young poets, who having barely put any…
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on Posthumous Keats, a “personal biography” by Stanley Plumly
“Every modern poet is obliged to have a view of Keats, as if he were part of the competition,” Clive James proclaims. Although he doesn't give us a clear reason why this is so, the assessment sticks. Wordsworth and Coleridge may have done most of the trenchwork for the Romantic poets, making radically new connections…
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on Metropolitan Tang, poems by Linda Bamber
There are many attractive qualities in Linda Bamber’s first book of poems, Metropolitan Tang: conversational brio, a feel for the times, a willingness to follow her own misdirections, a raconteur’s inbred sense of timing. Like a person one meets at a party who thinks of herself as social, Bamber is generous with her superfluities; she…
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on Senselessness, a novel by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated by Katherine Silver
An unnamed writer comes to an unnamed Central American country to copyedit the oral testimonies of Indians who had witnessed atrocities committed by the military. His employer is the “perfidious Catholic Church … so-called defenders of human rights.” On page one, the writer mentions the “one thousand one hundred” pages of transcription to be edited…
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on A Scholar’s Tale, a memoir by Geoffrey Hartman
The Wall Street Journal recently published Joseph Rago’s op-ed piece on Priya Venkatesan, a lecturer in English composition at Dartmouth who has “threatened to sue her students because, she claims, their ‘anti-intellectualism’ violated her civil rights … She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of ‘French narrative theory’ that it amounted to…
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On A Day Like This, a novel by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hofmann
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. One day, in a German-language bookstore, he buys a few titles, “part of a…
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on Peace, a novel by Richard Bausch
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. The…
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on Selected Poems: 1970-2005, by Floyd Skloot
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. I’ve written at length on Skloot’s poetry in a Prairie Schooner review of Approximately Paradise (Tupelo, 2005), click here but now find some additional things to…
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on The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow
I recently heard about a guy 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…
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on The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir by Sarah Manguso
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. The antibodies destroy the neurons.…