The Ploughshares Poetry Reader

. Ploughshares Books, $0 (335pp) ISBN 978-0-933277-02-1

W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Hall, Robert Lowell, Maxine Kumin, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley and Charles Simic are among the more than 100 poets represented in this anthology of verse culled from Ploughshares magazine (where Peseroff is an editor). In one of the most impressive poems, Jane Kenyon's vivid ""Frost Flowers,'' a teacher alone on a hill at dusk recalls how her sarcasm wounded a student earlier that day. Personal microcosms abound. Richard Wilbur takes an imaginary horse ride through a Frost-like snowstorm, exploring the boundaries between dream and reality. There are also forceful poems on political themes: Denise Levertov, remembering Hiroshima, pleads for a halt to ``the war against earth''; Thomas Lux's ``On Resumption of the Military Draft'' exhibits acid bite. Paperback rights to NAL. (March 15)

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