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I’ve been meaning…
… for some time to review Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina but haven’t known what to say, or what intelligent I might say (to be more precise), other than noting that Svalina doesn’t sound like other American poets, except maybe flashes here and there of Russell Edson, the somewhat flat voice masking a manic zaniness, as if Steven Wright had thrown over stand-up comedy for poetry, and in fact there are some Edsonesque turns here, and some moments when I can imagine Svalina rubbing his brow the way Wright does in that puzzled and faintly pained way, as if it hurts…Read More
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Dewdrop Light
Adam Zagajewski is a marvelous poet. I say this although I’m able to read him only in translation. (I can read Dante only in translation, and his genius is likewise recognizable.) Literary types who complain (endlessly and in print) about the terrible limitations of language, including those who argue against translation as some kind of cheat, will encounter some arguments in Zagajewski’s intellectual memoir Another Beauty that I imagine they’ll find difficult to refute, assuming they bother to attempt a refutation. We’ve reached a point, in the U.S.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: Let the Truth Be Told
I promised in an earlier post to write about the second book I read in Mexico this year, Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations. But every time I try to write about the book I get stuck: Parra’s book is brilliant but, for me at least, unsummarizable. The collection contains five long poems in the form of speeches, which Parra actually delivered on various occasions.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 6
A couple of readers have wondered what happened by my posting of so-called School of Quietude poems. Well, here’s another batch, all drawn from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, by William Stafford. This little selection was hard to arrive at because Stafford wrote so many poems, even the weakest of which carry fragments of brilliance.Read More
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By the Light of a Page (Updated)
This review appeared in the January/February 2009 Issue of The Bloomsbury Review. ©2009 by Joseph Hutchison. NOTE: A correction and some additional information has been appended to this post as of 01/21/09. The Next One Thousand Years: The Selected Poems of Cid Corman By Cid Corman Edited by Ce Rosenow and Bob Arnold 207 pages, paper ISBN-13: 978-1-929048-08-3 ISBN-10: 1-929048-08-4 Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers 1604 River Road Guilford, VT 05301 All strong poets ground their work in their own “significant tradition”: an idiosyncratic, even contrarian view of what really matters in the history of their art.Read More
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Happy New Year!
To one and all….Read More
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Alive and Well
Thanks to those of you who emailed asking after my health because of the recent paucity of posts on The Perpetual Bird. I’ve been traveling by car and by air for a couple of weeks, the air portion of which left me with a nasty head and chest cold. That non-serious illness and a flood of gainful work has confined me to fragments jotted here and there to flesh out and post at a later time.Read More
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Closed Histories
I’m too harried with work to write a thorough review of Sara Veglahn’s extraordinary chapbook Closed Histories, but I want to take a moment to recommend it. To the extent that comparisons are useful in describing a distinctive new voice, I would say that her work has similarities to writers as diverse as Karen Volkman, Yves Bonnefoy, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux, and the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons. Needless to say, I hope, these associations are subjective, and Ms. Veglahn herself might disavow them all! So I should let her speak for herself, if briefly: From the window, light.Read More
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Traveling from Delight to Wisdom with Art Goodtimes
NOTE: This review appeared in the March/April 2008 Issue of The Bloomsbury Review. ©2008 by Joseph Hutchison. As If the World Really Mattered Poems by Art Goodtimes 128 pages, paper ISBN-13: 978-1-888809-49-7 ISBN-10: 1-888809-49-3 La Alameda Press 9636 Guadalupe Trail NW Albuquerque, NM 87114 Poetry is not a democratic art. It is not a product of the demos, that is, but the fruit of solitary labor—though honed, in some cases, by public performance. It is idiosyncratic, suffering in committee and dissenting—sometimes loudly, sometimes sotto voce—from every parade.Read More