Reviews

A life lived in pause

Lynley Edmeades's 'As the Verb Tenses'

Anna Smaill
Photo of Lynley Edmeades (right) by Rory Mearns.

As the Verb Tenses is interested in varieties of distance — physical, temporal, emotional. As a collection, it seems not always certain whether to embrace or to overcome these distances. There is insight to be gained in the cultivation of detachment, it suggests; but might there be something lost in moments of hesitation?

The Duncan/Olson dichotomy

A review of two volumes

Adam Katz
Photos of Robert Duncan (left) and Charles Olson (right) by Jonathan Williams, from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection. Used with permission of Thomas Meyer.

Here are two elusive pieces of the context of midcentury American poetics. The Robert Duncan/Charles Olson letters have been available, until now, only in the brief reviews of each other that the poets extracted from them (“near-far Mister Olson” and “Against Wisdom as Such”), passages quoted by scholars who have been able to visit the archive at Storrs, and handfuls in Sulfur, Poetry, and Olson’s Selected Letters.

A vacancy one knew

Or: shallows of content; or: casuistry

Alan Davies

I have chosen this book / simply because I happen to have come upon a copy of it / but I’m taking it to be fairly representative of Ashbery’s later poetry / by which I would indicate the books that have appeared since Flow Chart (published in 1991 / and succeeded by a new book of lyric poetry every couple of years).

The paradox of the poetic sign is that the more densely textured it becomes, the more it expands its referential power; but this density also turns it into a phenomenon in its own right, throwing its autonomy into relief and thus loosening up its bond with the real world. — Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature

A review of 'Attributed to the Harrow Painter'

Matthew Girolami
Photo of Nick Twemlow (left) by Michael Marcinkowski.

The poems in Nick Twemlow’s second collection, Attributed to the Harrow Painter, address art as they do adolescence, family, trauma, and addiction: as strokes of what make both the artist and the now-father. The speaker of these poems is in his midlife and the father of a young son, whom he cannot parent without being informed by the forces and relationships that have defined him. The “I” of this collection may ironize or chide the self, but it does not deny that the “self” informs the work in spite of life’s free radicals.

Poetry in crisis

Rob Halpern and Keston Sutherland

Ed Luker

Stuart Hall, Brian Roberts, John Clarke, et al. write in Policing the Crisis (1978) that during the slow unfolding of crisis there is “a stripping away of the masks of neutrality.”[1] With the masks slipping off in our respective post-Trump and Brexit horizons, liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic stammer about how to put all this excess hatred back in the box, as if we could just return to business as usual.