This is a delightful collection – often thought provoking, sometimes poignant and always engaging. Keating understands the times in which we live. As she says in her introduction, it is: ‘a broken world with personal and collective emotions, pain of war and human travail that can bring us to our knees’. But gloom and desperation aren’t options for this fine lyric poet.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Anna by Angus Gaunt
The whole book has a feel of allegory, with the forest taking on an almost animistic feel – you get the sense of this non-human life crackling around Anna – but we also are invested in Anna’s survival. This is partly because Anna’s trajectory is driven forward by her growing survival instinct as she navigates night-time cold, constant hunger, environmental dangers, and the ever-present threat of the people she encounters – some helpful and some less so.
A review of Precarious by Judith Pacht
I marveled at how Pacht is a poet in constant absorption. From a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog to lines from fellow poets to topics like electrical currents and plastic surgery pulled from the news, the poet is a deliberate sponge whose words in the end are selected across a world of inspiration.
A review of Our Precious Wars by Perrine Tripier
Tripier’s exacting prose captures the story of a woman locked in and looking back on life, but it also holds moments of sheer joy recognizable by any reader who’s creating or reliving memory. May those moments extend beyond the walls of a house into a fully-lived life. Level the rubble, indeed.
A review of Chords in the Soundscapes by Michael J. Leach
One of the opening epigraphs by Brenda Eldridge likens music to ekphrastic poetry, but the poetry in this book is often ekphrasis based on music, taking its cue from the experience of listening. The result is poetry that is descriptive, rhythmic and often catchy in the way that popular music can be.
A review of The Last Furies by John Biscello
John Biscello’s astonishing work, The Last Furies, is a vaudeville routine wrapped around a radio drama, tucked into a theater piece, bound by a screenplay, drawn into a rich and sprawling novel. Imagine a character in a play. What if they had an inner life outside of the script and the production itself?
Redemption Songs: A review of The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News by Roy Bentley
When he says “Movies are what we have in the United States of America / to save of from some poverty of Spirit,” (99) he speaks for humankind. That he does so in words that are passionate, elegant, and honest is his readers’ good fortune. Roy Bentley is one of the best poets writing in English, and The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News is his best book to date.
A review of The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge by Charles Rammelkamp
Here, as elsewhere in this fine collection, Rammelkamp’s poetical plain style doesn’t attempt to call attention to its cleverness, but mirrors Coolidge’s own reserved eloquence. Or as Abraham Lincoln once ironically opined: if you keep your mouth shut, people will think you’re a fool. If you open it, they’ll know for sure.
The retrofitted grotesque: A review of Vivienne by Emmalea Russo
Russo’s Vivienne is an off-putting montage that attempts to answer what art has to atone for, or whether it has anything left to offer at all. Women who are childish, nearly opaque, and naturally mildly misandrist are a rare and treasured sighting that I am delighted to have been granted.
A review of trying x trying by Dora Malech
The paronomasia here and all over trying x trying is astounding, and the cryptic title – trying x trying – likewise highlights Malech’s elusive cleverness, her coy, seductive use of words, her dexterity with language. Dora Malech’s verse makes you think of an acrobat who makes it look so easy, flying through the air, swinging on the trapeze, gracefully contorting, spinning, landing in a seemingly single effort.