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I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing, essays by Lucia Perillo
In “From the Bardo Zone,” Lucia Perillo writes about visiting a creek where salmon come to spawn and die. “Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful for the people who push me out when I bog down in the mud,” she says. “But it drives me crazy when someone tries to take me aside (that is,…
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On the Poetry of John Allman: Lowcountry
Later this month, New Directions will publish John Allman’s eighth book of poems, Lowcountry. He retired from teaching 10 years ago (for 26 years he taught at Rockland Community College of SUNY) and has spent the past decade’s winters as a non-golf playing resident of Hilton Head, South Carolina. At 72, he continues to evolve…
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Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, a biography by Ben Ratliff
In his autobiography Straight Life, Art Pepper talked about how deeply he was influenced by John Coltrane – so much so that when he came out of prison in 1964 without his alto horns, he acquired a tenor sax. Ben Ratliff plucks the following quotation from Pepper’s book: “ ‘More and more I found myself…
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On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page, essays edited by Liam Rector and Tree Swenson
The vexing question raised by Frank Bidart’s poetry: Is the language we speak to each other, in negotiating our days, just a stream of euphemisms? Is the language of poetry any better? As Forrest Gander says here in “The Art of Inhabiting the Body,” “Although the poems protest, they do not seek to shatter familiar…
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on Robert Stone’s Prime Green, Carolyn Forche, The Writer and the World
Dwight Garner reminded us recently that August 21 was Robert Stone’s 70th birthday and that September marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Stone’s first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. This year also brought Stone’s memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (Ecco). The narrative begins in 1958 when Stone served in the Navy aboard…
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on Jonathan Wilson’s Marc Chagall
Chagall arrived in Paris from Belorussian Vitebsk in 1911 and set up his studio in La Ruche, the now famous art colony, alongside fellow Jewish painters Modigliani and Soutine. But he always got along better with his poet friends, such as Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, than with other painters. “In 1911, and through Chagall alone,…
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Radiant Lyre, Essays on Lyric Poetry, edited by David Baker & Ann Townsend
In Journal of the Fictive Life, Howard Nemerov took a shot across the bow of lyric poetry, reminding poets of the skills required to avoid slipping into affectation. “Lyric poetry, just because of its great refinement, its subtlety, its power of immense implication in a confined space – a great reckoning in a little room…
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A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Benjamin Ivry
Just before he died in 1969, Witold Gombrowicz drafted this remarkable romp through European philosophy as a series of terse “lessons” for his wife Rita. The line of thought runs from Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Husserl and Kierkegaard through Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre, with a final flourish on Marx. “Philosophy is needed for a global view…
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on Habitat: New & Selected Poems by Brendan Galvin
Brendan Galvin has published twelve books of poetry starting with No Time for Good Reasons (Pittsburgh, 1974). Although he has written very little criticism, his piquant point of view of his contemporaries is more than apparent. In 1978, Ploughshares published his essay “The Mumbling of Young Werther: Angst by Blueprint in Contemporary Poetry.” By that…
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Like Wind, Like Wave, essays by Stefano Bolognini, translated by Malcolm Garfield (Other Press)
Bolognini’s book of genial essays on psychoanalytic study is subtitled “Fables from the Land of the Repressed.” Unlike the dynamic, multi-layered, and often literary essays of the psychologist Adam Phillips, Bolognini’s work is based on simple or extended anecdote and reflection. He writes for a more general audience and his perspective and tone, broad and…
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on Reflections on Literature and Culture, criticism by Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt has been called the most formidable public intellectual in post-WWII America, despite the possibility that some of the reflexive reverence she elicited derived from her status as a remnant of a lost Kultur. The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition are still listed on college syllabi, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, still provoking…
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on Polish Writers on Writing, edited by Adam Zagajewski
“ 'What is not said, tends to nonexistence.' It’s astonishing to think about the multitude of events in the twentieth century and about the people taking part in them, and to realize that every one of those situations deserved an epic, a tragedy, or a lyric poem. But nothing – they sank, leaving only a…
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The Same Solitude, Boris Pasternak & Marina Tsvetaeva, by Catherine Ciepiela
Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva conducted a correspondence between 1922 and 1936, though they rarely met. (Rilke joined to make the exchange triangular for a few years.) It was not until 2000, when the archive of Tsvetaeva's papers was finally opened, that the entire exchange could be fully appreciated. With this material in hand, Catherine…
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An Elemental Thing, essays by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions)
In 2005 Weinberger published What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles, a collection of his political articles (NBCC prize nominee). He's returned with literary work, but it's quite different from his past essay collections, such as Works on Paper. Weinberger is the great translator of Octavio Paz into English -- but it's the Borges of Selected Non-Fictions,…
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The Poetry of David Hilton
This past April, Coffee House Press brought out David Hilton's final book, Living Will. Hilton died in 2005 at age 67. In the book's afterword, Dave Clewell aptly calls Hilton "a spiritual grandson of Whitman and a son of the good Dr. Williams." Hilton's poetry brings to mind some of Williams' most telling statements about…