Review: On "The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov"From the Print

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A major poet whose writing covered the better part of the twentieth century, Levertov is probably best known as an activist of the 1970s who strongly opposed the Vietnam War and fought for social justice. Others, especially Catholics, see her primarily as a religious poet—one who returned the spirit of Romanticism to its source in divine mystery…

Micro-Review: On Geoffrey Nutter's "The Rose of January"

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Into the dusk-charged air of such words lies the vegetable kingdom of Keats and Schuyler, the textural-as-sculptural in Nutter’s arsenal. Like a calmer Dean Young, what lies beneath Nutter’s titles reveals an intersection of quietude and zaniness. Sensualists rejoice! Lovers of language’s eerie physicality. Oglers of its draping of shapely phrases with imaginary weight…

Micro-Review: On Joe Weil’s "The Great Grandmother Light"

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That is, the neighborhood working stiffs of northern New Jersey, its chummy losers and benign perverts, the children of the American 1970s where labor was still a mainstay even as popular culture was only beginning to whitewash this country’s regionalism (i.e. Frost’s much fetishized provincial sound) into a media-ted, medicated, middle-going American suburbia…