The common mistake that readers and critics have made with Frost’s work is to read metaphor and symbol out of the poetry and attempt to render it as stark realism. It is Frost’s ulteriority, often revealed through the unconventional use of familiar poetic figurations, that compels us to explore the agons inherent in his work, otherwise we’d have very few reasons to return to the poems as often as we do.
The poem exerts a magnetic attraction, largely due to its lyric intensity and the unpredictable development of its content: from a pastoral setting on Cornell’s campus in Upstate New York (where the “single creek” featured in the poem cuts through the Cascadilla gorge), to the capaciousness of its scientific quantifications of the cosmos and the apparent awe inspired by the poet’s realization of his place in the universal scheme, and finally to the surprising lament at the end of the poem.
A good friend had been pressing me to come to the Chautauqua Institution after he found out about myContinue Reading
i Getting to her was like shoplifting a pack of cigarettes: First there’s the thrill, the secret and theContinue Reading
Roleplay by Juliana Gray My rating: 5 of 5 stars Juliana Gray’s Roleplay is the winner of this year’s EugeneContinue Reading
Concluding his essay on Wallace Stevens in Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell commented: “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.” If that is so, Seamus Heaney was a lightning rod.
Flatrock is a very impressive first book by any standard. Its reeling portraits of lower class life hearken to the rough speech, coarse sentiments and unapologetic sexuality of Emile Zola’s Germinal or Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road by employing neo-romantic realism and social comment to create an exciting visceral experience for the reader. Ms. Lock’s voice, by turns perceptive, witty and tart, and yet still capable of great tenderness, is remarkably consistent throughout, . . .
What surely will be one of the main literary events of the year, if not the decade, is the U.S.Continue Reading
On Louise Glück and the Yale Series of Younger Poets | Kenyon Review Online. This is an interesting article byContinue Reading
If you are familiar with Terry Eagleton’s commentaries and criticism at the London Review of Books, you know he isContinue Reading
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