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There is a difference it used to make, seeing three swans in this versus four in that quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its effects were. Declarations ...
May 23, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Carl Phillips
Pursued by Love’s Demons Pursued by Love’s Demons
As if the back streets of our local city might dispense with their pyrrhic accumulation of dust and wineful tonality, offer a reprise of love itself, a careless love rendered g...
May 23, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Charlie Smith
Futbol Futbol
As if to move a flexible sphere from here to there with unassisted head and foot were natural and obvious. As if a dance could always bow to resolute constraint and never be dance...
May 16, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Alfred Corn
A ‘Thirst for the Divine’ A ‘Thirst for the Divine’
Charles Wright and Charles Simic count among the best poets of their generation. Each career has unfolded with considerable excitement for serious readers of contemporary poetry, ...
May 2, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Jay Parini
Discovery/The Nation ’02 Prizewinners Discovery/The Nation ’02 Prizewinners
The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/ The Nation, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. Now in its twenty-eighth year, it is an annual contest for poets whose work ha...
Apr 25, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Various Poets
The Enemy The Enemy
The buildings' wounds are what I can't forget; though nothing could absorb my sense of loss, I stared into their blackness, what was not supposed to be there, billowing of soot...
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Rafael Campo
Stationary Stationary
Perhaps time is our invention To make things seem to move Like the uncovering tail of the blue jay As it lights its feet on the wet Trembling wood. Perhaps the seasons are really n…
Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Laura Manuelidis
Song of the Sunshine State Song of the Sunshine State
Campbell McGrath's entertaining and frustrating fifth book of poems--every single one of them devoted to some aspect of Florida--raises two large questions. One has to do with rep...
Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Burt
Sonnet: Against Making Blood Speak Out Sonnet: Against Making Blood Speak Out
If I die one day from the bullet of a young killer-- a Palestinian who crosses the northern border-- or from the blast of a hand grenade he throws, or in a bomb explosion while I'...
Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Meir Wieseltier
The Marvel of the Obvious The Marvel of the Obvious
"There are things/We live among 'and to see them/Is to know ourselves.'" These three lines are among the most stirring written by George Oppen, a poet whose modesty and honesty p...
Mar 7, 2002 / Books & the Arts / John Palattella