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New Books - 04/09
Like a River (the books flow)
National Poetry Month (that’s April, in case you didn’t know) means that publishers open the poetry tap. Here are but a few of the new books on the shelf or about to be...
Face ($18 paperback / $28 hardcover Hanging Loose), Sherman Alexie’s first book of poetry in a long time, is a generous collection -- 160 pages -- of brash, funny, and touching poems and short prose. He moves easily through a variety of traditional forms and is so willing, even eager, to relate anger and humor towards others and towards himself that the work is disarming. Occasionally a poem is interrupted by prose and proceeds back and forth between the two, and footnotes also play a large and humorous part in some of the pieces. The writing is at times as plain as can be -- “I praise hunters / because I want them // to deliver food / to me” -- and at other times richly metaphoric -- “All day and all night my lies roar in the trees. / I thunder and wake my sons and my wife. / She holds the older, she soothes the baby, / And I’m blue lightning flashing his thin blue knives.” Reading this book is like hitching a ride with a passionate and garrulous driver.
From the ever inventive Canadian author Lisa Robertson comes Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip ($14.95 Coach House) -- “We’d be applying our makeup at noon, leaning on the balustrade, thinking about a little shun, a little fight, a little sofa. We’d be thinking about hinges. We’d feel for our pen. Something might seduce us. A likeness. A knowledge. // Samesame pouring through it.”
Sestets ($23 FSG), a collection of forthright, meditative six-line poems is the nineteenth book from Charles Wright -- “After a certain age there’s no one left to turn to. / You’ve got to find Eurydice on your own, you’ve got / To find the small crack between here and everywhere else all by yourself.”
Some years ago, Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser began compiling an anthology of bird poems. The result is The Poets Guide to the Birds, ($22 Anhinga), a gathering of 151 poems from 137 contemporary American poets, a poetic sky filled with vireos, whippoorwills, falcons, gulls, larks, and many more species. Here are the heron, as envisioned by Jane Hirshfield, who “slept / with his long neck / folded, like a letter / put away,” and the sparrow, who “is / his hunger organized,” as Wendell Berry so neatly puts it.
Chelsey Minnis’s Poemland ($14 Wave) continues her tradition of writing spare, quirky poems within which she often refers to writing poems. The results approach the snap of Zen koans. “Writing a poem is like trying to do something, isn’t it? / It’s like trying to have an ungroveling feeling.”
There’s been a freshet of prose by or about poets…
The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation ($15 Graywolf) by Fanny Howe is an intellectual, spiritual, political, familial autobiography, both meditative and crisp. Charles Simic’s Renegade: Writings on Poetry and a Few Other Things ($19.95 Braziller) is a collection of new essays exploring the lives and work of a variety of writers and artists. Simic continues to be among the most thoughtful and articulate poets writing about the art. Stephen Burt has come out with Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry ($19 Graywolf), a gathering of essays about (primarily) contemporary poets. He is a passionate and helpful advocate for reading the poetry of one’s time. My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century ($27.50 Yale) is a biography of Taha Muhammad Ali (author of the powerful collections So What and Never Mind) written by Adina Hoffman, who, with Peter Cole, founded the amazing and needed press Ibis Editions in Jerusalem, which publishes “the literature of the Levant.”
And due April 7th is The Dance Most of All ($25 Knopf), a new collection from Jack Gilbert, that master of the lyric, now in his 80’s and still writing moving and vivid poems.
Also take a gander at our April 2009 calendar for write-ups of John Felstiner's Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems ($35 Yale); Lucia Perillo's Inseminating the Elephant ($22 Copper Canyon); Oni Buchanan's Spring ($17.95 Univ. of Illinois); and Jon Woodward's Rain ($14 Wave).
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