Reviews - December 2013

A walking proposition

On Pam Rehm's 'The Larger Nature'

Pam Rehm is a poet whose work consistently abounds with a quiet intensity. The nature of this intensity might best be described, as in her opening poem, “Another Dimension,” as an “evident immersion / in another dimension” (4), a “diligent seclusion” being the necessary beginning to such an immersion.

Ongoing 'Planisphere' notebook

Anthony Madrid

At right: John Ashbery. Photo by Arielle Brousse.

People are much too free with the phrase “a great book of poetry.” They think if the book has ten really good pieces in it then it’s a great book.

They don’t talk that way about albums. For it to be a great album it can’t just have some hits. You have to consider the not-hits, too.

His own shine, her smooth inscrutable

A review of Pattie McCarthy's 'Marybones'

Linda Norton

Right: McCarthy reading at the Kelly Writers House on January 23, 2013.

I’ve heard people gasp when they first see the cover of Pattie McCarthy’s Marybones. They’re responding to the fabulous and impossible breasts (one in particular) in Jean Fouquet’s 1452 painting.This Madonna is pornographic: anachronistically Barbie-dollish and as gray as a corpse.

Of fear in abstraction

A review of Fiona Hile's 'Novelties'

Mathew Abbott

At right, Fiona Hile reading July 3, 2012.

“Mondrian Green” is the final poem in Fiona Hile’s Novelties,[1] and one of the most significant in this significant book. It refers to the famous absence of green in the Dutch abstract painter’s mature compositions. Mondrian is said to have hated the color, perhaps as a result of having compromised himself for years while young and struggling, painting floral still-lifes for bread and butter. Mondrian, who would apparently sit with his back to windows in order to avoid gazing out at any greenery, said during a 1915 walk in the moonlight that “all in all, nature is a damned wretched affair. I can hardly stand it.”[2]

Fits of imagination

A review of Thomas Meyer's 'Beowulf'

Courtney Rydel

In being caught between two times, that of composition and circulation, Thomas Meyer’s translation finds itself in harmony with its source text. Meyer translated Beowulf in the 1970s, after completing a 1969 senior thesis at Bard translating the rest of the surviving Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus. Our introduction to Meyer’s electric translation, however, is more recent, as it was released by punctum books, an open-access and print-on-demand publisher, only in 2012.