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New Books - 06/07
On the Vanishing of Large Creatures by Susan Hutton ($14.95 Carnegie Mellon) It is tempting to say that a number of the poems in this volume are breath-taking, but breath-giving might be more accurate. Quiet and expertly rendered, they form a deeply humane collection that is a fine addition to the American lyric tradition.
The domestic -- marriage, children, family and friends -- provides the book’s cloth, a realistic and unromantic domesticity presented with intelligence and kindness. Yet stitched throughout is the larger world, its strange facts, both sorrowful and beautiful, its echoing history and unknowable future, making for a work of contemplative breadth, and revealing Ms. Hutton to be an edgewise philosopher -- “Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel, finished eventually and went home. / But that fervor must be somewhere.” Persistence and evanescence, those mysteriously joined elements of life, repeatedly draw her attention, and she views them with equanimity -- “We were at our most poignant, and we were commonplace.” That, the poems gracefully suggest, is something to mourn, something to praise.
Ripening by Paul Hunter ($14.95 Silverfish Review) Beginning with a marvelous, scuffling music, “Footsore trudging these fields / while overhead dip and wheel / unfolding lives on the wing,” Mr. Hunter takes us on an agrarian path. He explores what is it to grow up in a time and place where livelihood comes though the never certain act of governing nature. Through story-telling and lyrical evocation farming and farmers are celebrated, and the loss of same to corporate farming (a storm cloud that goes unnamed here) is mourned. The compression of these poems can be eye-opening, as when a wood pile is described as “wealth in plain sight,” and his ear for taut American idiom is fine -- “In town you hire a guy to do a thing.” Some of the stories are comic, some tragic, all move toward a loving expression of affection and grief for a vanishing way of life.
Two recent essay collections of note—
Collected Prose by Rae Armantrout ($17 Singing Horse) Ms. Armantrout’s collection begins with a response to Charles Bernstein’s question in 1978 “why more women didn’t ‘do language oriented writing,’” and follows with several essays and a few interviews offering crisp and considered opinions on subjects spanning the short poem, poets who influenced her, and silence in poetry. She writes from a lively mind and comes across as faultlessly honest.
Now & Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns 1997-2000 by Robert Hass ($26 Shoemaker & Hoard) Mr. Hass’s weekly newspaper columns, gathered here, offer appreciations of poets and/or poems. His taste ranges widely -- Shakespeare, Harryette Mullen, Vasko Popa, and D.A. Powell are among the focused on. Fitting the newspaper format, the essays are short, and Ms. Hass’s affable style and breadth of interest make this a compulsively readable book.
And take a look at our June 2007 calendar listings, where you'll find write-ups of Maryrose Larkin's The Book of Ocean, Donna Stonecipher's Souvenir de Constantinople, Alan Chong Lau's no hurry, and Lucia Perillo's collection of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature.
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