FullReviews Index

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some eighty poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions. Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke-Box presents, alongside a facsimile of the notebook page from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique.

The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
Known mainly for her political protest poems of the 1930s, Muriel Rukeyser was attacked throughout her career: by the Left for not being Left enough, and by the Right for being too leftist, by New Critics for writing poems that referred to the social context, by the House Un-American Activities Committee for being a "concealed communist," by Marxists for not believing the party line. She just could not win.

The Poetry Home Repair Manual
Recently appointed as the new U. S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser has been writing and publishing poetry for more than forty years. In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets—aspiring or practicing—can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art.

Delights and Shadows
For more than thirty years Ted Kooser has written poems that deftly bring dissimilar things into telling unities. Throughout a long and distinguished writing career he has worked toward clarity and accessibility, making a poetry as fresh and spontaneous as a good watercolor. A gyroscope balanced between a child's hands, a jar of buttons that recalls generations of women, and a bird briefly witnessed outside a window -- each reveals the remarkable within an otherwise ordinary world.

Ariel: The Restored Edition
Sylvia Plath's last book, Ariel, was first published in 1965-66 and did not follow Plath's manuscript as she had left it before committing suicide in 1963. In her foreword to this volume, Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter, explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, Ted Hughes, and her mother's original version published here.

In the Dark
In the follow-up to her National Book Award winning In the Next Galaxy, Ruth Stone returns to issues of memory, aging, and loss. She has been called a "people's poet" and "America's Akhmatova," writing a poetry of everyday life which recasts the mundane as important and indispensable. When asked whether poets improve with age Stone, 89, replied: "There's no question. If your brain goes on and on, as it should under normal conditions, there's more in it and your writing will get more profound."

Old Glory, American War Poems
This unique, comprehensive anthology gathers together more than two hundred poems about the American experience of war—narratives, meditations, elegies, lamentations, odes, tributes, and battle hymns—many of them classics. Written by soldier-poets as well as poets on the home front, they are deeply personal, reflecting love of country, sacrifice, tragedy, glory, and sometimes disillusionment or dissent.

Why I Wake Early
Mary Oliver has been writing poetry for nearly five decades, and in that time she has become America's foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents forty-two new poems, all written within the last two years. This volume includes poems on crickets, toads, trout lillies, bears; on greeting the morning, watching deer, and, finally, on lingering in happiness.

It Was Today: New Poems
In praise of his poetry, The New York Times calls Andrei Codrescu "one of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers." He is also an audacious and passionate poet whose new work is the perfect tonic for America’s political, literary, and cultural hangovers. The heart of "It Was Today" this first new collection in nearly a decade is an elegant conceit containing the “recently discovered” correspondence between a warrior and a courtesan in fourteenth-century China.

The Clerk's Tale
Recently, The New Yorker devoted the entire back page to a single poem, "The Clerk's Tale," by Spencer Reece. The poet who drew such attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral."