Recently I’ve been reading British detective fiction written almost 100 years ago––Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham. Detectives reveal the guilty, absolve the innocent, and soothe a reader by returning the moral balance to society. The society in these novels is, of course, fully hierarchical. The titled are admired, lower classes too if they know their place; […]
I was introduced to the breadth of Ruth Stone’s work sometime in the 1980s, probably by Donald Hall after he and Jane Kenyon moved to a farmhouse in rural New Hampshire cousin to Stone’s farmhouse in Goshen, Vermont. By then Stone had published three books with Harcourt, and I’d noticed the one poem from her […]
By now, my Facebook friends have hashed over and derided Matthew Walther’s opinion piece “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month” in the Dec. 29, 2022 New York Times. Several have noted that Walther is editor of The Lamp, a conservative Catholic literary journal. For others, Walther’s nostalgia over his youthful enthusiasm for Eliot may […]
My first in-person reading since Petition came out in 2020 finally happened mid-August at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. The tiny space has survived in its Harvard Square location since 1927, selling “mostly poetry––minimum of prose,” and I was excited to read with two poets whose work I’ve admired for years. I’d read with Steven many […]
John Glowney has been writing poems since at least 1973, when I met him at the University of Michigan. He was an undergraduate and I was a Junior Fellow in the salad days of Michigan’s Society of Fellows program. Fellows were given a generous stipend for three years, no strings attached, to deconstruct the French […]
When I was an undergrad at Queens College (CUNY), my poetry professor reviewed an anthology for the liberal arts-and-politics magazine The New Leader–maybe The New Modern Poetry edited by M.L. Rosenthal? I don’t remember the book, but I do recall that the review ended with my professor asking why the editor left out certain promising […]
In the final lines of “Motet for Mom,” Ruth Lepson asks her mother, “What do you think about?” Her mother responds, “Everything that happens at that moment.” It’s a good description of Lepson’s perspective and focus throughout on the way: new and selected poems. As the introduction to her recent reading at the Grolier Bookstore […]
In the March/April issue of The Women’s Review of Books I found a poignant essay by journalist and memoirist Vivian Gornick. Gornick had reviewed Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur in 1977, when the book was first published (I recalled the friend who recommended the book to me in the late ‘70s; I remembered […]
Along with fresh, arresting work by Frank Bidart, Lloyd Schwartz, and Chase Twitchell, and a mesmerizing portfolio of portraits by the late Ralph Hamilton, the Spring/Summer issue of Salmagundi features a symposium provoked by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. “Shakespeare Wasn’t Woke,” by children’s book author Meghan Cox Gordon, argues that a movement […]