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New Books - 02/06
Jane Hirshfield's newest is After ($23.95 Harper Collins), a
gathering of her Buddhist-influenced, highly lyrical work. "The fog grazes
here, then there, / all morning browsing the shallows, / leaving no
footprint between my fate and the mountain's." While her vision encompasses
the presence of pain in life -- "The body of a starving horse cannot forget
the size it was born to"-- she makes no secret of her desire for
non-attachment, "to live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live, / one
shadow fully at ease inside another." Scattered throughout the volume are
"Assays," reading like short odes, wherein Ms. Hirshfield imaginatively
occupies subjects as various as Hope, Poe, Envy, "Of," "To," and "And." The
collection on the whole is of elegantly composed, deeply felt poems.
The first volume from Seattle's Wave Books is Poem for the End of
Time and Other Poems ($12) by Noelle Kocot , a harrowing collection that
remarkably conveys both fragility (of the self and the world) and vigor. Its
epigraph, John 11:35, "He wept," sets a tone of grief that is carried
through the book, precipitated no doubt by the death of Ms. Kocot 's
husband, but also perhaps by a cultural sorrow. The first third of the
volume is comprised of lyric poems that vibrate with Ms. Kocot's unusual
imagery and compelling phrasing: "I walk among the hidden vestibules / On a
perfectly flawed mission of getting older. // Soft white words are
emblazoned on the sky. / To guide me? No, the thrashing of a dispirited /
Angel...." The remainder of the book is the long piece "Poem for the End of
Time," a searing, mantra-like text that evokes the music, energy, and
emotion of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." It is a fearless, uninhibited
outpouring: "My neighborhood my neighborhood my neighborhood / Up in
flames my neighborhood / I call out to you who are living my neighborhood /
I call out to you who live in my house my neighborhood / Where I walk around
in ghost shoes / Where I eat and drink rust."
Black Lab ($23 Knopf) is a collection of poems from the poet,
editor, and translator David Young. The lab of the title is a dog who, Mr.
Young asserts, reverses Winston Churchill's description of depression as a
black dog. "He's our black lab, wherein mad scientists / concoct excessive
energy. It snows, / and he bounds out, inebriate of cold." His poems are
plainspoken, quietly personal, and often wistful. But they feature, too,
occasional leaps of imagination that come of Mr. Young's long association
with the Field Translation series, wherein Vasko Popa, Miroslav Holub, and
other fine Eastern and Western European poets were offered to American
readers.
Two recent anthologies have arrived. From Sarabande Books comes
Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century ($24). Editors
Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin have selected 85 poets born after 1959 who,
at the time of the selection, had published no more than three books. Each
poet is represented by a minimum of three poems, so we are given a fairly
generous sampling from a new generation of poets. The University of
Arkansas has published Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics ($24.95), edited by
Deborah Brown, Annie Finch, and Maxine Kumin. Spanning centuries, cultures,
and aesthetics, this volume gathers excerpts from essays, poems, interviews,
and letters, all focusing on the how and why of making poetry. Among the
included poets are Po Chu-I, William Blake, HD, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
Callimachus, and Paul Valery, to name but a few.
Upcoming Books - 1/06
Just to whet your appetite, here's a list of books due in the next few
months. Give a call or drop us a line if you want to be notified when a book
has crossed the threshold.
- After by Jane Hirshfield, her sixth collection of new poems
- On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay, by Robert Creeley, a (sadly) posthumous collection of 31 new poems
and an essay on Walt Whitman
- Averno by Louise Glück, rave advanced reviews for this series of poems drawing on the Persephone myth
- In the Middle Distance by Linda Gregg, her first new collection since 1999
- At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver, a CD of the poet reading 40 poems; also includes a booklet
with an essay and photos
- Groundwork: Before the War / In the Dark, by Robert Duncan, his magnum opus available in one volume
- Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke-Box:
Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments,
by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Alice Quinn, drawn from Bishop's notebooks and papers
New Books - 1/06
Just in time for Valentine's Day comes Out of That Moment: Twenty-One
Years of Valentines by Ted Kooser, published by the talented Sam and Sally
Green at Brooding Heron Press ($25 paperback). Since 1986, US Poet Laureate
Kooser has been composing a poem to mark February 14th and sending it to a
mailing list of women that now includes several hundred names. Those poems,
including the one for 2006, have been gathered in this lovely letterpressed
edition, limited to 500 copies. Mr. Kooser writes in his Author's Note: "Of
all the activities I get involved in, sending valentines has been one of the
most pleasurable. I intend to keep it up until I am silenced once and for
all."
Cash Machine, the nascent publishing arm of Open Books, is proud to
announce its first commercial publication -- Story by Molly Tenenbaum
($6.50). This letterset chapbook is comprised of one 128-line poem that
might be described as Bartleby meets R.E.I. "Tell me more about skiing, he
said. // You stand on sticks with rolled-up tips like slippers. / A rope
pulls you up / A tall white hill. / Then you let go and slide down, his
mother said. // He tried to imagine skiing." The poem is a magical fable of
language and inaction that could be enjoyed both by adults and children,
quirky children.
We've received a plethora of remainders for our shelves. What's a
remainder?, we hear some of you asking. On occasion, and for various
reasons, publishers sell off copies of books at a reduced rate, and we in
turn can offer them to you at a sale price. Recently arrived are
Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000 by Marvin Bell ($6.50 paperback); The Poems
of Marianne Moore edited by Grace Schulman ($9.50 hardcover); All Poets
Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s by Daniel Kane
($7.50 paperback with CD); Transparence of the World by Jean Follain,
translated by W.S. Merwin ($3.50 paperback); Voices by Antonio Porchia,
also translated by Mr. Merwin ($3.50 paperback); Selected Poems of Amy
Lowell $4.50 paperback); and more, more, more.
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