<P>These new poems by the author of Saint Judas and The Green Wall embody a sharp break with his earlier work. Their impact is well described by the British critic Michael Hamburger: «He has absorbed the work of modern Spanish and other continental poets and evolved a medium of his own. This medium dispenses with argument and rhetoric, and presents the pure substance of poetry, images which are &#8216;the objective correlatives' of emotion and feeling. It is only in...
<P>Cynthia Genser's landscapes, like those of D.H. Lawrence, are analogues of human emotions; her men and women exist in their effects-prototypes one minute, passionate and distinctly visible individuals the next. Person and place invite the reader into an adventure that begins and ends everywhere.</P><P>The language employed throughout is voluptuous, sensuous, yet precise. The appeal is to all the senses as well as to reason and intelligence: the...
<P>Apples from Shinar was Hyam Plutzik's second complete collection. Originally published in 1959 as a part of Wesleyan University Press's newly minted poetry series, the collection includes «The Shepherd»—a section of the book-length poem «Horatio,» which earned Plutzik a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize. «The love and the words and the simplicity,» that mark Plutzik's poetry, writes Philip Booth, «are all here [in Apples from Shinar], and the poems come...
<P>John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From...
