Reviews

 

 

 

Darwin's Ark
by Philip Appleman

Indiana University Press, 1984; 85 pages; $15
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22092-9

25th-anniversary and first paperback edition: Indiana University Press, 2008, $19.95.

(This review was first published in Home Planet News, Vol. 6, No. 2, spring-summer 1987)

Reviewed by Martin Mitchell

Philip Appleman opens the preface to his most recent collection, Darwin's Ark, with a quotation from Basil Bunting ("I think that a man who wants to write in the twentieth century makes a great mistake if he doesn't begin by reading The Origin of Species") that voices Appleman's own opinion and introduces a brief account of the author's lifelong exposure to the work of Darwin.  Read Review

 

The Darkness Above: Selected Poems 1968-2002
by Donald Lev

Red Hill OUTLOUDBOOKS, 2008; 187 pages; $20
ISBN 1-879969-15-7, paper

Reviewed by Jared Smith

The key to understanding New York is organic rhythm — the rhythm of the streets, the stores, the ghosts … all those things that have no meaning beyond themselves but which we spend most of our lives building and which must be understood in order to dance the dance of meaning. Donald Lev has studied that meaning in short clipped cadences for better than 40 years, shuffling and fox-trotting his way along the streets as an unflinching messenger from the gods of culture, community, and commerce …    Read Review

 

Janet Hamill's Theater of Dreams

Bowery Books, 2008; 88 pages; $16.95
ISBN978-0-9800508-6-8, paper

www.janethamill.com

Photographs by Patti Smith

Reviewed by Diana Manister

One of the few American poets who work the borderland between rationality and dreaming, Janet Hamill writes poems whose meta-theme is the active presence of the subconscious in psychic life. Her new 88-page volume of poems, Body of Water, her fifth, further establishes her as an heir to the insurgent counter-tradition in poetry dedicated to the belief that reason is not the only reliable way to achieve knowledge.   Read Review

 

Causeway
by Elaine Sexton

New Issues, 2008; 73 pages; $14.00
ISBN 1-930974-77-9, paper

Reviewed by Alison Woods

What I like most about Causeway, Elaine Sexton's second collection of poems, is the concession between varied extremes. Tension infused in small moments becomes radiant as Sexton confidently leads us back into the concrete middle ground. The non-epiphany becomes an entity unto itself, playful or woeful. Whether she is helping her mother navigate aging in "A Bird in the House" or waiting patiently for the man behind the counter to finish a phone call in "Village Butcher," we are engaged.  Read Review

 

More Than a Memory, Reflections of Viet Nam

Modern History Press, 2009; 224 pages; $21.95
ISBN 978-1-932690-64-4; paper

http://www.modernhistorypress.com/more-than-a-memory

by Susan Moger

The writers who contributed to More Than a Memory, Reflections of Viet Nam, edited by Victor R. Volkman (Modern History Press, 2009) grab us by the lapels, lean in close, and compel our attention. And "attention must be paid" (in Arthur Miller's words) to these stories, not only by those of us who lived through the Vietnam era, but also by those who know it only as history.  Read Review