Word: poeticisms
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...good time to ponder that question. More admired in principle than in practice, more respected than read, American poetry has survived the '90s through a combination of benign neglect, accumulated goodwill and a devoted cult of readers who will still be on deck reciting favorite lines should the poetic Titanic ever go down. But there's good news: the lifeboats have been launched. This publishing season brings three books--J.D. McClatchy's Ten Commandments, Yusef Komunyakaa's Thieves of Paradise and Deborah Garrison's A Working Girl Can't Win--with room for passengers of every class...
...Giroux; 198 pages; $20). Although Hughes, 67, Britain's poet laureate since 1984, commands a wide and respectful audience among readers of serious contemporary poetry, the appearances of his books have not, until now, been stop-the-presses affairs. What makes Birthday Letters different is its subject matter: Hughes' poetic meditations on his marriage with Sylvia Plath...
...psychological complexity and the deep-running poetic current that came out of it seem (as they seemed to the young Berenson a century ago) peculiarly congenial to modern eyes. His work is sown with recondite allegories, complicated quirks, unexpected twists of meaning. Despite its often ravishing formal beauty, it is full of unease. Apart from Durer's famous etching Melancholia, Renaissance art can show no more poignant portrayal of the way depression freezes both action and curiosity in its sufferers than Lotto's Portrait of a Young Man, circa 1530. It depicts its subject with sallow face, deep dark eyes...
Even when Holub strays outside his boundaries, his writing remains quick and poetic. A team of six translators (including Holub himself) collaborated on Shedding Life, and they succeed admirably in capturing the terse, aphoristic quality of his prose. For instance, Holub likens the Vietnamese minipig, the Eastern bloc's lab animal of choice, to "a semibald porcupine caught in a frontal collision between two armored cars...
...Silence and "that song" everyone brings up when the Sundays are mentioned. "Summertime" has a contagiously hummable chorus but completely indiscernible verse lyrics, which is a shame because, as the most upbeat and melodious of the album's songs, the track is also one of its deepest and most poetic. It begins by painting a honeymoon postcard picture, complete with a "romantic Piscean," an "angel in disguise" and a Poconos-style "heart-shaped hotel room." This image is then contrasted with the situation of those born into circumstances hidden from Western eyes: "but all I see is films where...