Ambitious, austere, and very hard to forget, this third book from Arnold (The Reef) consists of one 47-segment sequence, all of whose parts have something to do with damaged, disfigured, or surgically altered heads and bodies. Arnold weaves in memories of her own treatment for cancer, but they are brief, almost impersonal. More often she will observe, with compassion and distance, the wounds and the efforts of other human beings, especially those injured in modern war— the "Iraqi Boy," for example, with "two-third of a laughing mouth// visible, the wheelchair in this case,/ its sparkle stark against// the flannel and plied living limbs within it." Many poems react to Henry Tonks's photographs of amputees and other casualties from World War One, "medical illustrations of" (for example) a man who "can't close his mouth// because he doesn't have a mouth." Influenced by George Oppen, Arnold ends up poised between political protest and existential investigation, between an attack on the things we can do to our bodies and an amazement that we have bodies at all. Her "darkness speeding into darkness" offers very little consolation, but clear-eyed readers will prize its serious work. (July)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 03/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Stern's early volumes had consistent strengths, combining the gritty epiphanies of the Deep Image school (think of Galway Kinnell) with attention to working-class Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, to American immigration, and to Jewish tradition (think of Philip Levine). "Come with me to Stanley's and spend your life/ weeping in the small park on 106th St." one poem invites. The prolific Stern, whose many honors include a National Book Award, moved in the course of three decades from Philly and New York City to New Jersey to the University of Iowa; these poems shift, too, from one locale to the next (with stopovers in Italy and Crete: "Crete is a kind/ of moon to me, a kind of tiny planet"). But the sensibility, and the music of speech, do not much change: an almost loquaciously informal free verse, a commitment to plain-man American diction, and a quest after the deepest truths of the unadorned spirit show up in almost all his work, up through (and including) the long elegy for Stern's father with which this big collection ends. Admirers will be happy to have so much in one place, but Stern does repeat himself, so new readers may not find this the best place to start. (July)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 07/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

In his third collection, which is also his darkest, Jackson (Hoops) delves into wrenching, personal subject matter in rigid 10-line poems, a formal choice that seems to inspire an emotional nakedness he hasn't previously achieved. He begins on a visionary note—"For I, too, desired the Lion's mouth split/ & the world that is not ours, and the wounded children/ set free"—and then, in the same poem, name-checks Duke Ellington: these poems range widely across various registers and subjects, from the timeless and mythic to pop culture. But at the core of all of them is an awareness of the dark beneath everyday goings-on: "The neighbors/ know your comings and goings, but the syntax/ of your smiles is revealed only to little children." Also at the heart of these poems is the painful dissolution of a marriage, which Jackson compares to "a democracy lost to a monarchy." This leads, in a poem called "Therapy," to "Ashes of fire in his mouth, rain sloshed in/ his head" and to a life with "Stray dogs for company." Yet, there's resolution, a new love: "I am learning/ the steps of a foreign song." This powerful book represents a painful but inspired journey. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Schneiderman practices, and sometimes excels at, the kind of art that seems, at first, artless: his sonnets, prose poems, and sparse free verse show a laconic figure whose grave reserve reveals itself in carefully stripped-down language, using only the most common American words. This second collection organizes itself around the poet's eight-part elegy for his mother, which provides some of its rawest lines: "I shovel dirt on your coffin. This is the living kicking you out. The dead go under the ground, so stay there." Elsewhere Schneiderman (Sublimation Point) reaches for historical events that also provoke awe, or horror, or mourning: in "The Children's Crusade II" "The body is a gate,/ a test." Another poem cuts back and forth between Aeschylean tragedy and the film High Noon to make its points about peace and war. Schneiderman's connections between world events and his own experience can seem strained, his verse effects less elegant than simple: yet he finds, often enough, a durable wisdom in his reduced means: "Each mouse," he writes, "is the first mouse,// the same failure/ to live clean-/ ly." (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Vendler stands among America's most respected critics. This big book of informed, sometimes witty, always thoughtful and determinedly accessible commentaries follows the model of Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets; 150 poems by Emily Dickinson appear alongside essays explaining how to read each one. Vendler (a professor at Harvard) explains Dickinson's intricate, fast-changing metaphors, her emotional extremes, her metrical oddities, and her frequent dissent from organized religion, "the unbeliever commenting on the deluded faithful." Contrary to stereotype, the Dickinson here is less eccentric than deeply ambitious, unwilling to compromise in her search for the right words, the right work of art, the right spirit of life: beneath one late, flirtatious poem's "mischievous play... lies the yearning of the unique Dickinson for a natural companion resembling herself." The collection anticipates readers who will open it up at random, read through at leisure, or else search for a specific poem: it may overwhelm those who attempt to read it straight through. Yet that depth, that concentration on single poem after single poem, is one source of its strength: riddling, idiosyncratic, sometimes coy, and extraordinarily intelligent, Dickinson's poems respond almost ideally to the analysis Vendler is best equipped to give. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Zapruder's third collection of hip, quirkily haunting yet surprisingly earnest poems is his best and most beautiful. He spans the major genres—love poetry ("I admire/ and fear you, to me you are an abyss/ I cross towards you"), elegy ("I have been coasting,/ but from this [moment] forward Grace I vow/ I shall coast no more"), ode ("my friends ordered square burgers/ with mysterious holes leaking a delicious substance"), friendship tribute ("Dobby lives/ in Minnesota and seems basically happy"), to name a few—updating them for the 21st century. He even proves himself to be a charming nature poet: of a fox he says, "it held a grasshopper in its mouth,/ which it dropped when it saw the small carcass of a young javelina." These poems are still full of quick jump-cuts, seeming tangents, and almost adorable imagery, but all more focused on subject matter. In the spooky but also companionable titular long poem that closes the volume, Zapruder communes with an array of unseen presences, from the reader to the shades of his family and influences: "Come with me/ and I will show you/ terrible marvels.// The little cough I heard in my mind/ was one I remembered/ my father made just as he died." (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

In the connected, untitled lyrics that make up the final section of Valentine's 11th collection, the poet is at her fierce best. She addresses Lucy, an early hominid whose skeleton was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. The details that Valentine always renders palpable and significant are heightened by their juxtaposition with this long-lost life, as when she questions: "Did you have a cup, Lucy?/ O God who transcends time,/ let Lucy have a cup." Current terrors—bodies falling from the World Trade Center towers, the deaths of a pair named Ruth and Grace—are both contextualized and underscored by this totem "skeleton mother." Valentine writes: "when my scraped-out child died Lucy/ you hold her, all the time." The rest of the volume ranges in subject matter and setting, moving from a soldier in the Civil War to a chemo patient, Haiti, ghosts in elephant fields. Each poem shares Valentine's trademark concision and pared-down punch. Some of her severe observations can stop your breath: "Don't listen to the words—/ they're only little shapes for what you're saying,/ they're only cups if you're thirsty, you aren't thirsty." (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Ellis's highly anticipated second collection has a bit of everything: poems in an array of forms—a concrete poem meditating on the English vowels and money, an abecedarian list of "Black Writing" terminology, a photo essay shot at the James Brown memorial at Harlem's Apollo Theatre; prose poems; meditations on New Yorker covers; and lots more. Throughout, Ellis (The Maverick Room) makes a complicated, often contradictory critique of race relations in America; he has as many self-corrections to put into practice, "sucker-punching I," as he does punches aimed at others: "One of these badass/ glorious days,/ the signs and negative sounds/ that worked against us/ will all begin their tenures/ of service.../ It has already begun with/ ‘Nigger' and ‘Bitch.' " While much of his work would be right at home on a spoken-word stage—Ellis is an extraordinary reader of his poems—he feels deeply uneasy about the pigeonholing of black poetry, "as if the craft of our/ inherited calling had only/ two camps of Blackness,/ ‘Academic' and ‘Spoken Word.' " This big book concludes with an amazing 35-page biography/elegy for Michael Jackson and the era through which he lived, and which he deeply affected. No doubt, this is a major book. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

James Longenbach (The Art of the Poetic Line) is an incontestably brilliant critic. This fourth book of poetry shares some of the virtues of Longenbach's criticism—the poems are unfalteringly wise and knowledgeable about the poetic tradition. At their best moments, these often narrative poems borrow the haunting logic of distant memories ("I wouldn't say this to everyone, but when I wrote / In heaven, if you say the word death, nobody understands, / I was thinking about paperclips"), but there are also moments when this book reads like a short story. Still, Longenbach is an expert storyteller and never fails to alight upon dazzling and often ominous visions: "The snow is in retrospect an image of/ Plenitude, not of desolation." His stories also tend to be scholarly: "Though my father painted like Sargent/ He raised me on modernism./ ... Space was color, shadow was color." Throughout the book, Longenbach seeks words for the few fundamental truths: "You're angry because everyone you love is dying./ You've known this since you were a child." (Oct.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 10/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

This 20th collection from the former U.S. poet laureate (My Noiseless Entourage) departs only by degrees from his poems of earlier decades—but it could just be his best book. Like most of Simic's work, these new poems end up short and sad, setting mysterious, wry, even Kafkaesque, scenes in which nobody gets what anyone wants: "A dark little country store full of gravediggers' children buying candy./ (That's how we looked that night.)" Simic served as laureate in the last years of the Bush administration, and some of his new poems may reflect that experience: they attack, with a pessimistic asperity, callous military officers, bloodthirsty states and unnecessary wars, along with a weary or cynical America: "the TV is on in the living room,/ Canned laughter in the empty house/ Like the sound of beer cans tied to a coffin." Simic alludes quietly to the war-ravaged Serbia he fled as a child. But the "ragged puppets" who populate Simic's stanzas are not always so foredoomed: in an 11-part sequence called "The Invisible," Simic modulates into a restrained and deeply moving lyric lament, admiring a dragonfly for his clear wings, a crow who was once "a professor of philosophy," and a "Bird comforting the afflicted/ With your song." (Oct.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2010 | Release date: 10/01/2010 | Details & Permalink