The poems in distinguished poet Elton Glaseras sixth collection journey through the seasons, from spring to spring, a pilgrimage down to the South, over the Midwest of snow and roses, and across the Romance countries of Europe. If the poet often finds himself a[h]alfway between grief and longing,a that may be his natural condition, rooted in this world against the pull of the next, his faith in the apurple evidence of plums, the testimony of wild persimmona weathering the stormy preachers and the droughts of middle age. Within that tension, the range of tones is unlimited, sometimes in the...
The poems in distinguished poet Elton Glaseras sixth collection journey through the seasons, from spring to spring, a pilgrimage down to the South, ov...
Elizabeth Hadaway doesn t just tell stories in her poems, she aims to delight as much as instruct, and her poems are scores for performance. Sparkling with shout-outs to Beowulf and Keats, varied meters, and surprising rhymes, she lifts centuries of hurt and anger into a contrary music. Her reach is vast, including everything from T. S. Eliot to the swans on her vinyl lace shower curtains. She warns us off from stereotypes and misconceptions about Appalachia and the South. Here are short lyrics and long narratives, poems about ballads, baton twirling, hound dogs, Shelley, and NASCAR stars. In...
Elizabeth Hadaway doesn t just tell stories in her poems, she aims to delight as much as instruct, and her poems are scores for performance. Sparkling...
From Carole Simmons Oles comes a new modern poetry biography, this one based on the life of American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908). After an exceptional apprenticeship in Rome, Hosmer opened a studio there where she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, George Eliot, and the Brownings. Her sensual renditions of Beatrice Cenci and Zenobia earned her notoriety and acclaim. Though some of her work survives today, much of it has disappeared. Oles rediscovers Hosmer's life in Waking Stone. This is a dialogue, an exploration of what Oles calls their "parallel universes." In...
From Carole Simmons Oles comes a new modern poetry biography, this one based on the life of American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908). After an exc...
Greg Rappleye s Figured Dark is a collection of contemporary lyric and narrative poems, set in an American landscape, which takes as its implicit theme the journey of the soul from darkness into light.
The voices in the collection call across a vast landscape of myth, memory, and horrific wreckage. In the title poem, speaking of the phenomenon of fireflies rising at night from a southern field, he writes, I could read this down to a million tiny bodies, / blazing the midnight trees, but the reader is left to wonder whether any extravagant numbering can account for the massed...
Greg Rappleye s Figured Dark is a collection of contemporary lyric and narrative poems, set in an American landscape, which takes as its imp...
Outlaw Style is a collection of narrative and lyric poems, many of them in the tradition of Robert Browning s dramatic monologues. While gothic imagery, humor, and nineteenth-century diction and reference alternate and interweave, the four thematic currents that converge in the collection are music, race, spirituality, and the impact of monstrosity on somewhat innocent bystanders. Poems like Dar He, Scuppernongs, and Plantation of the Mad address the history of American racial intolerance with muted horror, while the final series of poems explores the roots and impact of traditional music,...
Outlaw Style is a collection of narrative and lyric poems, many of them in the tradition of Robert Browning s dramatic monologues. While gothic imager...
