Kategoria BISAC: Poetry >> American - General

The Bad Secret takes readers on a dark yet sometimes comic sojourn through the undercurrents of a life suddenly unmoored by grief, and then to the subsequent rise of the spirit to recovery. Tough-minded and intellectual, Judith Harris's poems are also distinguished by brilliant images close to metaphysical. They reflect on childhood, nature, mental and physical illness, the loss of a mother, and the levity of being simply human. In a voice entirely her own, Harris confronts life's secrets with their hidden meanings inspired by guilt and redemption, offering a music of tenderness and hope....

Half Wild is spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to life like the bee "up to his hips in love" who "will fall asleep in the snow" and "wake up still kissing his flower." In O'Reilley's poems, human, animal, and mineral creations interpenetrate and share surreal conversation -- even stones exchange stories of "hot times in the magma" and animals are listened to intently. Here sacred inquiry is grounded in a passion for the natural world,...

"The poems that make up Brian Swann's rich and constantly rewarding book Snow House are muscular and masterful. He has a marvelous ear and the ability to write poems that move insistently forward to a lovely and offhand resolution. The long and sinuous sentences that make up this collection range over the natural world, memories, and myths -- and, like 'a kind of semiotic stuntman, ' Swann merges these subjects with the poems ostensibly describing them, so that you suddenly realize that you are being pulled along by a song 'that mirrors itself with you in the middle / doing much of the...

Kitchen Heat records in woman's language the charm and bite of domestic life. Ava Leavell Haymon's poems form a collection of Household Tales, unswerving and unsentimental, serving up the strenuous intimacies, children, meals, pets, roused memories, outrages, and solaces of marriage and family.

Some of the poems are comic, such as "Conjugal Love Poem," about a wife who resists giving her husband the pity he seeks when complaining about a cold. Others find myth and fairy tale lived out in contemporary setting, with ironic result. Others rename the cast of characters: husband and wife...

Kitchen Heat records in woman's language the charm and bite of domestic life. Ava Leavell Haymon's poems form a collection of Household Tales, unswerving and unsentimental, serving up the strenuous intimacies, children, meals, pets, roused memories, outrages, and solaces of marriage and family.

Some of the poems are comic, such as "Conjugal Love Poem," about a wife who resists giving her husband the pity he seeks when complaining about a cold. Others find myth and fairy tale lived out in contemporary setting, with ironic result. Others rename the cast of characters: husband and wife...

The Piercing celebrates the here and now while endorsing a deep faith in the necessity of the imagination. In response to life in a literal world, Christine Garren's lyric poems ignite belief in exhilaration. Ordinary settings--a park, a pond, a littered vacant lot, an attic room--through Garren's eyes reveal something extraordinary. For example, in "February Snow," the poet surveys a winter scene through the windows of various rooms and reflects how "Sometimes it is beautiful, in some of the minutes / then ordinary again-- / . . . that feeling / of air in the midst of burial." In "The...

In Hunting Men, poet Dave Smith reasserts the validity of poetry in our times. With eloquence, grace, and a searching intelligence, Smith illuminates both poems and poets. Believing that "great poetry cannot be divorced from an intimate, organic link to place," he builds a compelling case for the importance of southern poets. Like the hunters who taught Smith as a young man patience, observation, and willingness to rely on his senses, he leads readers on an expedition through a specific poetic place with a sure sense of direction and destination.

Beginning with a discussion of southern...

Escaping the House of Certainty marks a departure from Susan Ludvigson's previous verse and taps a new experimental vein for the poet. Some of the poems resemble abstract art -- a collage of fragments, alternately floating and spliced, evoking personal associations and approaching a three-dimensional sentience. In a series of prose poems, Ludvigson combines dreams with elements from French villages, creating surprising new revelations forged from the unconscious and the known. For lighthearted relief, she provides an assortment of recipe poems: "Eggplant Provencal, a Homily," "French...