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Book Reviews: Poetry
The poetic genius of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) blossomed early and burned briefly. Nearly all of his work was composed when he was in his teens. During the century following his death at thirty-seven, Rimbaud's work and life have influenced generations of readers and writers. Radical in its day, Rimbaud's writing took some of the first and most fundamental steps toward the liberation of poetry from the formal constraints of its history, and now represents one of the most powerful and enduring bodies of poetic expression in human history. Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters is one to own and treasure for years to come.
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While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written.
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In his first poetry collection in a decade, Time and Materials, former poet laureate Robert Hass is in great form, simultaneously blithe and commanding. A devoted translator and literary scholar, Hass is as sensuous as he is cerebral, writing unfettered poems that run like water, an open road, a conversation over wine, a long kiss. Yet how masterfully composed these works are, how crisp, precise, bestirring, and powerful. Hass is enthralled and irreverent in poems about creativity, memory, and time, especially in the magnificent Art and Life.
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Gulf Music is the seventh collection of poems from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, our great "civic poet." The NY Times says "...the poems of Gulf Music are among the best examples we have of poetry’s ability to illuminate not only who we are as humans, but who we are — and who we can be — as a nation." And what other poet can claim to have appeared on both The Simpsons and The Colbert Report?
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This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Mary Oliver's work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet's work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems--a dazzling achievement. As in all of her work, the pages overflow with keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet's attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Oliver's most wide-ranging volume to date.
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