Poetry Notes

Since his suicide in 1978, Frank Stanford has been a legendary figure among poetry enthusiasts. While most of his work has long been out-of-print, his powerful, surrealistic poems, which evoke a wilder America and an intense inner life (“Go away virgin/ if I lay my head/ in your lap too long/ they will come and lay/ a knife in mine”), have retained a cult following. Now Lost Roads, the press Stanford founded with poet C.D. Wright, has reissued two of his collections, You ([SPD, dist.], $15 48p ISBN 978-0-918786-56-2) and The Singing Knives ([SPD, dist.], $15 64p ISBN 978-0-918786-55-5), which are sure to bring new readers to the work of this too-little-known poet.

Hip by contemporary standards, Henry Parland was a Swedish modernist poet whose short, visionary, often funny poems written between the two world wars are new to American readers. Ideals Clearance (trans. from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson); Ugly Duckling Presse [SPD, dist.], $14 144p ISBN 978-1-933254-22-7) is packed with irresistible lines: “Youth:/ hunger/ or a weariness that/ dances?”

Poet and editor Reginald Shepherd chose 23 edgy contemporary American poets with inquisitive, postmodern attitudes toward poetry for Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath [SPD, dist.], $19.95 304p ISBN 978-1-933996-06-6). These poems—by Peter Gizzi, Brenda Hillman, Nathaniel Mackey, Martha Ronk and Marjorie Welish, among others—ask questions like “what is poetry, a looking out or a looking in?” This will be a helpful anthology for readers and students looking to orient themselves toward this vital American tradition.