Paul Guest is going to be on Oprah! Okay, not exactly. But I wouldn't be surprised if he did end up on her show in the future. The good news? ECCO picked up his memoir and his next book of poems, just like that. How awesome is that!
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And speaking of good poets who should be penning a memoir (as in RIGHT NOW!),
James Allen Hall's first book of poems is due out from Arkansas any day now. I am serious about writing a memoir, James! I want half of it done by the end of Spring!
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The new PW is filled with reviews of poetry collections. Here are a few:
New Collected Poems
Eavan Boland. Norton, $27.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-393-06579-4
Boland’s resilient braid of outspoken feminism with Irish identity has given her a following on both sides of the Atlantic. Here is the recent Boland whose rapid verse celebrates women’s courage and women’s work, both public (several poems acknowledge Mary Robinson, the former president of the Irish Republic) and unsung: the poet remembers herself, when young, asking a statue in Dublin to “Make me a heroine.” Here is the poet who learned from Adrienne Rich, among others, how to tackle big topics of loyalty, rebellion, descent and dissent: “No testament or craft of mine can hide/ our presence/ on the distaff side of history.” Here, too, is the poet who broke new ground for Irish poetry in the 1980s by depicting with verve both domestic happiness and burdens, “the stilled hub/ and polar drab/ of the suburb.” The apprentice poet of the 1970s, learning not only from Rich but Auden, Plath and Yeats, is also here. Boland has never been subtle. Sophisticated readers may find her work hampered by windy rhetoric, as when “The Singers” in the west of Ireland are described “finding a voice where they found a vision.” (Mar.)
Primitive Mentor
Dean Young. Univ. of Pittsburgh, $14 paper (104p) ISBN 978-0-8229-5991-5
The prolific Young (Embryoyo) sometimes seems a creature of mere whimsy, spinning provocative sentences almost at random, one after another; at other times he’s a dynamo of invention, whose ceaseless changes of mood and topics, absurd connections between incompatible tones, explicitly sexual energies and underlying unease more than justify his recent prominence and his obvious influence over so many younger American poets. Between its postsurrealist comic claims (“In the desert I feel like I’m made/ entirely of broccoli”) and its fun with shock value (“We sniff glue./ I have a medium-sized White House in my sperm”), this ninth book will certainly please fans. Yet the volume also finds Young reaching more often for pathos and earnest representations of pain. One of the best poems begins, “Shouldn’t someone have run for help by now?” Another begins, “You must be careful eating thorns.” The moments of lament (evoking, at times, Wallace Stevens) allow Young to slow the book down, to make not only a poetry to caricature our contemporary culture (suffused as we are with so much information) but also a verse suffused with halting regret: these saddest of Young’s poems might even bring prior doubters into his fold. (Feb.)
For Girls and Others
Shanna Compton. Bloof (Ingram, dist.), $15 paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-6151-6697-1
This second collection shows more unity but less versatility than Compton’s rightly praised, devil-may-care 2005 debut, Downspooky. “For Girls,” the first of the two sequences that make up the book, responds to, reacts against and takes many phrases from an 1882 “health manual” with the same title: its advice on fashion, bodies and morals gives rise, in Compton’s hands, to quirky but politically pointed verse: girls are told (too often, she implies) “to erase the body,/ blank the self/ to receive the costumes it consumes.” The source text—and all the antifeminist counsels, all the social pressure, it represents—may give Compton too easy a target: her sequence recycles its own attitudes, with too few surprises for its length. “Comedy of Manners,” the second sequence, may be harder to like at first, but should fare better over the long-term: its hints of romantic narrative, frequent sarcasm, riffs on found texts and ambitious range of diction (from elaborate to vulgar) all serve Compton’s consistent interest in how and whether the culture will ever let girls grow up: “Our official position is class piñata.” (Jan.)
For the rest,
check out their page.
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Someone asked, after I posted the link to Jilly's commentary about gender, so here it is:
For poetry submissions at NER, we get about 60% men and 40% women. That said, if you examine a volume of four issues, the breakdown for a year of published poems is pretty darned close to 50-50. Also, interestingly enough, women seem more likely to publish more than one poem in an issue of NER vs. their male counterparts. So, the women must be better poets. Or the better ones send to NER. Who knows?
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And lastly, can I just say how much I love these guys! You may remember me posting the article about them getting married in Iowa during that short window in which it was legal. Something about their picture then made me so happy. Well, they still make me happy. Hard to explain why, but I just love them.
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I am the first guest in a new feature on poets who blog.*****************************
Clue: Nine
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