Winston-Salem, N.C. Wake Forest University Press. 2012. ISBN 9781930630604 This complex, evocative volume takes up the theme of haunting and return so central to Harry Clifton’s work, and does so…
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- Alamgir Hashmi, ed. Rafey Habib, Faruq Hassan, and David Matthews, tr. Whistler, British Columbia / Islamabad, Pakistan. Plainview. 2011. ISBN 9789699670008Your Essence, Martyr may serv…
- Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2012. ISBN 9781930630598 Speech Lessons exhibits all the lyrical grace of John Montague’s previous volumes without ever slipp…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307269683 Jack Gilbert’s Collected Poems may be one of the most important collections to appear this decade. Gilbert has an enduring mystique for his cont…
- Tibor Bárány, ed. Budapest. Magvető. 2012. ISBN 9789631430233Hungarian poetry is traditionally more engaged than private. Poems like Sándor Petőfi’s “National Song” ushered in the March revolution of…
- London. Salt. 2011. ISBN 9781844713462From the mid-1990s, Andy Brown has emerged from the small-press scene to become an important voice in the British poetry revival. As director of Exeter Unive…
- Belgrade. Arhipelag. 2011. ISBN 9788652300143Jelena Lengold’s sixth book, Bunar Teških Reči (A well of heavy words), published twenty years after her previous poetry collection (she has publi…
- Sinan Antoon, tr. New York. Archipelago. 2011. ISBN 9781935744016Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008, threaded themes of death and loss throughout his poetry of hope, resistance, and empowerment. He and…
- Iain Galbraith, tr. London / New York. Hamish Hamilton / Random House. 2011 / 2012. ISBN 9780241144732 / 9781400068906We know enough about translation to know that the poems of W. G. Sebald’s Acro…
- Rockford, Michigan. Presa. 2012. ISBN 9780983125136A good many of Kerry Shawn Keys’s poems can be characterized, if not explained, by the lines “Everything’s open to derangement” and “There aren’t any…
- Geoffrey Brock, ed. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. ISBN 978-0374105389To edit an anthology of modern poetry in translation is no easy task: not only must individual poets and poems from…
- Norman, Oklahoma. Mezcalita. 2012. ISBN 9780983738305Even if you own the four early books that make up the “selected” portions of Nathan Brown’s “New and Selected Poems,” I recommend this book for the…
- Robin Robertson, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2011. ISBN 9780374533533When Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, almost all European critics had to…
- Denver. Counterpath. 2011. ISBN 978-1933996233 Our appreciation of poetry almost always takes place within a single language. Although poems written in one language can be translated into other l…
- Duane Hada, ill. Norman, Oklahoma. Mongrel Empire. 2011. ISBN 9780983305262Brothers Duane and Ken Hada have produced an unusual and unusually beautiful book, which traces the White River, from its ori…
- 5 vols., 2 CDs. Donna Tamaki, Soraya Umewaka, and the author, trs. Konan City, Japan. Ishibe-higashi. 1999–2012. ISBN 9784944229765, 9784944229534, 9784944229710, 9784904625002, 9784904625019 S…
- New York. Knopf. 2011. ISBN 978-0307595423Although the range of material and features of style are essentially that of her earlier work—that is, not developmentally new—Jane Hirshfield’s latest book o…
- Minneapolis, Minnesota. Coffee House. 2011. isbn 9781566892773In the Shadow of Al-Andalus opens with a selection of epigraphs one might expect in a scholarly publication. Quotations by the me…
- New Delhi / London. Penguin / Hamish Hamilton. 2011. ISBN 9780670085415 / 9780241144916“The hermit sits upon the ice. / The bluish light burns all around, / Immune to flame and sacrifice, / To breath…
- Brother Anthony of Taizé & Lee Hyung-Jin, trs. Ithaca, New York. East Asia Program, Cornell University. 2011. ISBN 9781933947501In the preface to Walking on a Washing Line, translator Bro…
- Mari Kaljuste, ill. Tallinn, Estonia. Varrak. 2010. 102 pages. €11.25. isbn 978-9985-3-2091-4Second only to the late Jaan Kross and alongside Mats Traat, the creator of a lengthy rural series, Ene Mih…
- Peggy Reid et al., tr. Carolyn Forché, intro. Rochester, New York. BOA. 2011. 103 pages. $16. isbn 978-1-934414-50-7Remnants of Another Age is a bilingual Macedonian-English edition of s…
- Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez et al., ed. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. 2010. xxi + 337 pages. $26.95. isbn 978-0-299-23664-9African Women Writing Resistance is a compelling and…
- Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre Dame Press. 2011. xiii + 55 pages. $15. isbn 978-0-268-04236-3Imagine a market in a tropical city: bright sunshine, intense colors, rhythmic sounds of music an…
- Mexico City. Ediciones Era: Dirección de Literatura / UNAM. 2010. 186 pages. $21.95. isbn 978-607-445-030-9Juan Gelman (b. 1930, Buenos Aires), whom readers and critics have often accurately classifie…