Here is poetry of subtlety and scale: it's a record in equal measure of the sweeping and of the small. We are given a view of the world through a time-lapse camera, a pair of binoculars, a glass-bottomed boat, and we are made to see the movement in what we thought was stillness.
Like Conrad's Marlow, Joseph Millar speaks with fierce compassion and the authority of hard-won experience. In his remarkable third collection, Blue Rust, he lays down "the shield of irony" without taking up the consolations of easy sentiment or detached despair. The result is an unstrained originality: lyrics that avoid the metronome, leaps of imagination in which the associative logic never trails off into self-indulgent incoherence. Millar looks hard at a world that is doomed and beautiful. What sets Blue Rust apart is its ability to honor both sides.
For over three decades, Michael McFee has been, in the words of one critic, putting together a body of work that few poets anywhere, of any age, can match for its poise, its wit and metaphorical power, its accessibility and depth of feeling. That Was Oasis, McFee's eighth full-length book of poetry, is a collection of spirited and diverse elegies. Its poems pay inventive attention to the overlooked or underappreciated, to such subjects as saltines, holding hands, killing a copperhead with a hoe, the word bunk, bald spots, the young Thelonious Monk, and a minor-league baseball park in Asheville, North Carolina--all of which, seen in the right light, can become unexpected oases in the quotidian.
Cummins's quiet, lunatic meditations--wait, that should be luminous meditations--are great fun. From father-son stuff, and women grousing about that sentimentality, to killing someone in your basement, or turning into a locust, or imagining his wife's violent death, Cummins hasn't lost his touch. Though he does lose his hand in one of these. Maybe it should be numinous meditations? In various emergencies?
A Classic Contemporary reissuing of Falling Deeply Into America, poems by Gregory Djanikian.
Raymond Carver said of The Incognito Lounge, Denis Johnsons third and most widely acclaimed book of verse: The subject matter is harrowingly convincing, is nothing less than a close examination of the darker side of human conduct. Why do we act this way? Johnson asks. How should we act? His best poems are examples of what the finest poetry can do: bring us closer to ourselves and at the same time put us in touch with something larger.
Sarah Rosenblatts One Season Behind is an insightful look at the way life sneaks up on us, and time moves so gently, that we awaken one morning, and find the leaves have turned. She savors the innocence of our childrens questions, reflects on our feelings as we watch their lives unfold, and ponders the contrast between our parents and ourselves. She tenderly observes, the everyday details, like the play of sunlight on a sleeping cats back, and asks the questions we all ask as we move through our days, trying to catch up with times changes, and yearning for things to stay as they are. An engaging read that will leave the reader reflecting on the movement of their own lives, and rereading the pieces that touch them the most.
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