Thirst, by Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver, is a collection of 43 poems mainly centered around the death of Oliver’s longtime partner, and the poet’s various reactions to that sad event. While a number of the poems are typical mourning poems, with memories of good times and reflections on life without that person, the [...]
Archive for April, 2007
Amanda Rutstein
Poetry review #3
Stephanie Hemphill’s poetry volume, Your Own, Sylvia; a verse portrait of Sylvia Plath attempts to create a timeline of Sylvia Plath’s life through the voices of her family and friends using Plath’s unique sound. This is an incredibly ambitious project and could truly have transformed Plath’s biographical landscape, but it seems as [...]
Tyler Babbie’s 3rd Review: Eric Pankey’s Reliquaries
Eric Pankey’s book Reliquaries did not thrill me much. It is a very long book of lyric poetry, fifty poems long. Only a few of the poems reached me. Those that did were quite good, and those that didn’t weren’t bad. Just not the flavor I favor.
[...]
Mark Haddon’s The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea is an extremely thought-provoking collection of poems, though not necessarily the most accessible. As of yet, the book is Haddon’s only published venture into poetry, and is the first release since his critically acclaimed and widely consumed novel The Curious [...]
Tyler BabbieFinally, I’ve found another recent book and really loved it. Stephen Dunn’s book Different Hours was published in 2000, and I adore it. Dunn writes right on the cusp of the confessional and the private, creating a sort of restrained confessional poetry that I really appreciate. His explorations of love and aging all [...]
Tyler Babbie
I hadn’t read John Ashbery in a while, so I figured he’d be a good start for my reviews. I’d rather read older poetry, not because it is established, but because there’s a good chance that someone loves it. Otherwise it wouldn’t have survived. If someone loved it, I might, too. Ashbery was, I [...]
Star Dust by Frank Bidart, published in 2005, was a finalist for the National Book Award. This book is split into two sections of poetry. The first, entitled Music Like Dirt, contains fourteen poems. The second untitled section contains nine poems.
It’s easy to pick out the main theme of his poetry: to make [...]
Not only is Jack Kerouac’s book of poems, Pomes All Sizes, a collection of poems ranging from three lines to 200 hundred lines, his poems also vary in their style, subjects and intended audience. His poems are about his travels to Mexico, Tangier, Berkeley and the Bowerey. They range from silly and bizarre to serious, [...]
“Isle of Palms” Revision- let me know what you think!
Published April 18th, 2007 in Erica. 1 CommentDec. 30, 2006: Sullivan’s Island SC
It was his first trip:
his first deep sniff
of the sea restricted
by half-rolled windows
smudged with nose-
shaped wet. He leaned
far into the dark,
ready to run
eight long backseat
hours later.
I let loose the frayed
leash and with a jingle
he darted toward
the wide white beach
his first view
of the infinite sea
and sky side
by side.
His black form [...]
Jenny Fey
Robert Wrigley’s “Reign of Snakes” could be fairly classified as a collection of nature poems, but a more accurate description would recognize that Wrigley’s focus is really on people. In his discussions of death, fear, love, and relationships, Wrigley uses nature to demonstrate the ways that people respond to external stimuli. Since the natural [...]
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