Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

Although (Kevin Williamson) has gained a formidable reputation as a literary talent finder, the Highlander has always - his 1997 non-fiction tome “Drugs And The Party Line” aside - remained reluctant to launch his own forays into print. It makes it all the more surprising that the man who once vowed to “take a hammer [...]

“The epigraphs of Kei Miller’s debut poetry collection, “The Kingdom of the Empty Bellies,” come from the Bible (‘For out of your bellies shall flow rivers of living water’ John 7.38) and from the revolutionary Bob Marley song, ‘Them belly full (but we hungry)’. Throughout the collection, the characters struggle to reconcile the contradictions of [...]

“To write about Robert Hass is to face describing an abundantly rich life. Besides being a once-syndicated columnist who provided a weekly dose of excellent poetry by others (with accessible commentary that was never dumbed down), he is the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, an award-winning author, former U.S. poet laureate, an editor [...]

“John Ashbery’s 1985 “Selected Poems” drew on the first thirty years of his career, from 1956’s “Some Trees” to 1985’s “A Wave.” The new “Selected” spans the twenty years following ’85 in roughly the same number of pages. Indeed, the volumes have a nice symmetry: Each covers ten books of poems (the most recent, “A [...]

“Charles Bukowski was a monstrously homely man because of a severe case of acne vulgaris when he was young. Along the way he also had bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis and cataracts; he attempted suicide; and only while suffering from leukemia in the last year of his life did he manage to quit drinking. Bukowski was a [...]

“Poet Matthea Harvey creates a universe of her own but doesn’t post signs telling readers how to get there or get around after arriving. And this lack of authorial direction is precisely why her poems are so wonderful. In Modern Life, each reads like a stern and glorious fable of freakishness. The idiosyncratic world they [...]

“The three sections of “Windcatcher” mirror the seasons of Breytenbach’s adult life; there are poems written in exile, from 1964 to 1975; poems from prison, from 1975 to 1982; and poems written after his release, from 1983 to 2006.’ Read the review at the New York Times.

“Sixty Poems,’ Charles Simic’s newest collection, has been published to celebrate his appointment as the 15th poet laureate of the United States. Fans will share my disappointment at its brevity, but should welcome the volume as an opportunity to expand the audience of this Pulitzer Prize winner.’ Read the review at the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Kirsch wrote these 27 pieces for magazine publication, and most are good and short (but sometimes, as with his piece on Philip Larkin, the word limit crimps him, making one wonder why he didn’t expand and extend particular essays for the book). He illuminates one postwar living or dead poet after another, from Derek Walcott [...]

“Robert Pinsky has been writing outstanding poems for more than 30 years — “Gulf Music” is his seventh collection — but you’re more likely to know him for his poetry advocacy than for his own examples of the art. Given Pinsky’s public profile, this is more than understandable.” Read the review at the New York [...]

“The most common biographical narrative for modern artists is the Proustian one, from innocence toward disillusionment. For one titan of modern poetry, it moved in the other direction. Robert Creeley’s final “Selected Poems” (University of California Press, 360 pages, $21.95), which supplants a popular volume of Creeley’s early work by the same title, encompasses the [...]

“For most of the year, Ted Kooser is known as a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate of the United States. But in February he is a mass-mail Casanova. Kooser’s wife, Kathleen, knows about his extracurricular valentines, which he began sending via postcard in 1986. There were 50 recipients – female friends – that [...]

“As the title of his new collection (the first since his 1999 Forward prize for best first collection) suggests, Nick Drake uses these poems to explore the many permutations of “the word go”, from departure to commencement, eviction to consumption. But it is death - the final departure - that ultimately commands his attention.” Read [...]

“When college ends, the real tests begin. Happy, a recent grad of Penn State, learns to survive the world of advertising in Chip Kidd’s new novel The Learners, the sequel to Kidd’s bestselling, “The Cheese Monkey: A Novel in Two Semesters.” Kidd is best known as a designer of book jackets. (And not just any [...]

“Brigit Pegeen Kelly seems to typify the distinguished American poet. Her first book, To the Place of Trumpets (1987), won the Yale Younger Poet series; her second and third, published here as a single volume, led to a whole array of fellowships and awards, including a Pulitzer prize short-listing; she teaches creative writing at the [...]

“Like most exhilarating works of copious bloodshed, Toby Barlow’s debut novel, Sharp Teeth, begins on a quiet note: with a solitary, mild-mannered figure named Anthony Silvo, flipping through want ads at his East L.A. breakfast table. After several fruitless phone calls, he happens upon a position with the city’s animal-control department, which triggers the memory [...]