Review by New York Times Review
PRAY ME STAY eager By Ellen Doré Watson. (Alice James Books, paper, $15.95.) On the evidence of this exuberant poetry collection, her fifth, Watson (who poetry directs the Poetry Center at Smith College) has stayed eager indeed. One poem describes frogs "going nutso down in that sinkhole / pond," and closes, "they could care / less whether I thank or curse them / for their farty calls speaking sex." wild is the wind By Carl Phillips. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) The love poems in Phillips's 14th collection embrace the paradox of desire and stability, with his customary long lines and discursive, inquisitive voice, bullets into bells: poets and citizens respond to gun violence Edited by Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague and Dean Rader. (Beacon Press, paper, $15.) Clements conceived of this anthology, made up of poems about gun violence and responses from affected readers, after his wife, a teacher, survived the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Contributing poets include Natasha Trethewey, Ada Limón and Ocean Vuong - as well as Clements himself, whose poem "22" concludes with the events of that day and ends, despairingly, "After that, a lot of other things happened, / but it doesn't really matter what." collected poems By Galway Kinnell. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35.) Kinnell, who died in 2014, was a towering figure in American poetry, publishing 10 collections over 65 years; in 1982, his "Selected Poems" won both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. This is the first volume to gather all of his work in one place. "There would have been no 'The Da Vinci Code' without Elaine Pagels's the gnostic gospels, her calmly dazzling 1979 reading of a long-hidden trove of early Christian texts. Uncovered in the 1940s, these blockbuster documents kaleidoscopically broadened our sense of what Christianity was and is. As Pagels explains with graceful care, what has come down to us as the religion's fundamental tenets - regarding the reality of Jesus' resurrection, the nature of his martyrdom, the status of women, even monotheism itself - were not foregone conclusions but the victors in fierce (indeed, deadly) struggles for social and political authority. It's always a lot of chaotic battles that got us to the place we are; this is true of the canon in classical music, too, which is why it's been fun, as I belatedly read Pagels, to also thumb through Nicolas Slonimsky's hilarious lexicon of musical invective, a compendium of all the bad reviews that great works - we're talking Beethoven's Ninth, etc. - got when they were new. In both books, history is shown in the messy process of forming." - ZACHARY WOOLFE, CLASSICAL MUSIC EDITOR, ON WHAT HE'S READING.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Phillips (Reconnaissance) hazards a visit to an emotional territory reminiscent of Dickinson's "wild nights" in his 14th collection, in which he faces the unavoidable question: "Don't you want to find happiness?" These 35 poems are as haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named, and the work coheres through images of the sea and navigation, compasses and charts. The possibility of love is a risk taken under the "bright points of a constellation missed earlier,/ and just now seen clearly: pain; indifference;/ torn trust; permission." The explorer must to "say no to despair." The nautical conceit merges seamlessly with Phillips's more familiar metaphorical terrain of earth and sky ("leaves swam the air"). He startles readers afresh with his talent for transcendent metaphor leavened by rueful humor-"The oars of the ship called Late Forgiveness lift,/ then fall. The slaves at the oars/ have done singing-it's pure work, now"-and displays a well-honed ability to draw on varied literary sources in a register that's both academic and vernacular. As ever in his work, emotional dynamics resist easy resolution and the speakers unsparingly evaluate both the self and exterior world. Skillfully balancing philosophical discourse and linguistic pleasure, Phillips's much-admired capacity for nimble syntax unfurls like a sail, "each time, more surely." (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
In recent collections, two-time National Book Award finalist Phillips (Renaissance) has been preoccupied with the weight of the past, but here he surpasses melancholy to present moments of crucial rethinking. "I've pretty much/ been wrong," he says, and calmly, too, as he scans what has unfolded. Throughout, Phillips balances on the knife's edge of regret but doesn't cut himself, acknowledging that "accepting our position, and understanding it/ still mattered, but not like remembering what/ the point had been." It's just that grasping that point can be tricky. Memory is a "mirage of history" and history itself something that runs over us roughshod and obdurate. "What hasn't been damaged?" the poet reflects at one point, elsewhere observing, "The sea was one thing once; the field another. Either way, something got crossed, or didn't." Can we distinguish between what's happened and how it's recalled, between what's joyously starlike and merely bald-fact star? Does it all come to nothing (so different from "not knowing exactly what it's come to")? Registering these distinctions in life takes the same rapt attention that Phillips's compact, cerebral poems require, so that we can find all his gemlike observations. VERDICT Highly recommended.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
