Bucharest. Editura Tracus Arte. 2015. 209 pages.This kind of anthology drops readers with modest or no knowledge of the poetry of a nation into a labyrinth in which directions and destinations are far…
VERSE
New York. Knopf. 2016. 104 pages. Poet Amit Majmudar’s one-hundred-page book is frequently eloquent, captivating, and powerful; however, it is also partisan, puerile, and facile.One of the best p…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2016. 352 pages.Christopher Logue’s recent volume of poetry, War Music, holds Homer’s deft portrait of the Trojan War up to the present’s light. In the…
Gurgaon, India. Hachette India. 2015. 376 pages.Having been part of the resurgence of Indian poetry in English that was very much Bombay-centered, Adil Jussawalla brought out a brilliant debut collect…
Detroit. Wayne State University Press. 2016. 116 pages.If the American critic Stephen Burt’s precepts for reading new poetry—look for a persona and a world, not for an argument or a plot—are to be hee…
Grewelthorpe, Ripon, UK. Smokestack Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2015. 200 pages.Steve Ely’s Englaland evokes postindustrial scenes that become more richly meaningful as he connects the p…
Brookline, Massachusetts. Zephyr Press. 2015. 144 pages.It’s not uncommon for poets to fill collections with the momento mori of nostalgia, regret, and meditations on the end. Albanian p…
Durham, North Carolina. Jacar Press. 2015. 68 pages.This masterful collection begins with a foreword in which Gibbons Ruark describes how his association with Ben Kiely awakened his interest in h…
New York. Akashic Books. 2015. 88 pages.The second title to win the Paz Prize for Poetry—presented by the National Poetry Series and The Center at Miami Dade College to a previously unpublished m…
Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Press 53. 2016. 204 pages. Mystical and modern, Yahia Lababidi’s Balancing Acts, a collection of poems spanning across a career of decades, tethers togethe…
Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2015. 88 pages.In “Beyond Confession” (2001), Alicia Ostriker insists that a poetry of witness should not only include “history” and “the news” but that it…
Normal, Illinois. co•im•press. 2015. 376 pages.The title rings true. Juan Gelman’s Oxen Rage embodies tremendous tension (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 28). Submission and anger compete within…
Brooklyn, New York. Akashic Books, 2015. 103 pages.Born in Jamaica to a pharmacist mother and a policeman father, Colin Channer, an award-winning Caribbean diaspora writer in the US, has published a d…
Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2015. 103 pages.There is nothing like it in Chicano literature. Rudolfo Anaya’s writing, distinct and unusual since the publication of Bless Me, Última (…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 249 pages.When C. K. Williams died last year, he left behind more than half a century’s worth of superb work as well as a sterling reputation attested to b…
Tucson, Arizona. Schaffner Press. 2015. 239 pages.We live in a time of brevity. From the truncated language of text messages to the popularity of the 140-word tweet, we have lost our patience for exte…
London. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2015. 66 pages.“My hands dissolve in water. / My body wastes away. / The air drifts past and through me / Each night and every day. // Bright darkness is my comfort,…
Rochester, New York. Tiger Bark Press. 2015. 127 pages. In order to achieve inner stillness, one must first withstand turmoil. Experience of a major world war, a fellow writer’s public rejection of hi…
New York. Chelsea Editions. 2015. 427 pages.To dip into this volume, with its splendid translator’s introduction, is first to connect with a vital Italian poetic tradition. Although Lorenzo Calogero w…
Hilversum, Netherlands. Tungsten Press. 2015. 30 pages. The world of poetry suffered a deep loss last spring when Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Franz Wright died at sixty-two. Son of James Wright,…
Brookline, Massachusetts. Zephyr Press. 2014. 123 pages.The poems in Grass Roots speak almost exclusively of the present moment, which in Xiang Yang’s case happens to be the point at which th…
Los Angeles. Phoneme. 2015. 240 pages.While exiled in Madrid, the hypercosmopolitan poet Alfonso Reyes wrote Visión de Anáhuac, 1519 (1915), an exquisite narrative of Tenochtitlán and its con…
Budapest. Magvető. 2015. 64 pages.It was nine years ago that Zsuzsa Rakovszky published her last book of poetry, Visszaút az időben (Going back in time). Since then, proving her prowess as a…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 117 pages.The first challenging thing a reader encounters in this new collection by Paul Muldoon is the title itself. How literally can we expect the title…
New York. W.W. Norton. 2015. 160 pages.This is not merely a book of poetry. These are instructions for the soul, a song to lead the reader home. With Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings…