Melanie Rehak

The Nation

“May I tell you how much I love your poems?” Frank O’Hara crowed in the first stanza of a tribute to his friend Kenneth Koch in 1953. “It’s as if a great pipeline had been illicitly tapped/along which all personal characteristics/are making a hasty departure. Tuba? Gin?/…O Kenneth Koch!”

The Nation

In the fall of 1958, the second book by a young British poet named Philip Larkin made it across the ocean and into the consciousness of American poetry. The Less Deceived, wrote a reviewer for the New York Times, made him feel “as if my glasses had been miraculously wiped clean.”

Barnes and Noble Review

No one does fragments — glimpses of ontological questions, of minutiae, of pop culture, ancient civilization, of passion, sorrow, life and death — quite like Anne Carson. The most obvious examples are her translations of the poet Sappho’s fragments in the luminous If Not, Winter (2002), but these are really only the continuation of a long fascination with all that remains unknown. As far back as her earliest poetry and essay collections, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Glass, Irony and God (1992), and Plainwater (1995), Carson has always, alongside more traditional prose and verse, trafficked in what remains necessarily partial and unfinished in life. 

The New York Times Book Review

Poets, by nature, are incapable of living the unexamined life. No detail is too small, no sound in the night too muffled, to register. From this gradual accumulation of minutiae, this keen awareness, poems emerge. That such gathering should be evident in W. S. Merwin's latest contribution to his enormous body of work is no surprise -- he's had a great deal of practice, not to mention success, over the past five decades.

The Nation

“At times dear Gorham, I feel an enormous power in me–that seems almost supernatural,” Hart Crane wrote to his friend Gorham Munson in 1922. America was under the spell of Modernism, and Crane was on the cusp of his twenty-third birthday, but he had been sure since the age of 17 that he was destined for literary greatness. 

The New York Times Book Review

Way back in 1932, when the century was young and had yet to give way to our collective millennial anxiety, F. Scott Fitzgerald cast a backward glance and wrote that ''New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.'' And though he, like many others, experienced the inevitable disillusionment, that has not prevented a steady flow of people since from wallowing in the gleaming possibility that is Manhattan, among them Frederick Seidel.

The New York Times Book Review

By way of explaining one of her recent poems, ''That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,'' Eavan Boland wrote last year that she remained connected to this poem -- a philosophical measure of how little official documents tell us about humanity -- because it represented to her ''a small diagram of an argument most poets enter at some stage or another: who makes the destination, who marks the way, where is authority and who will contest it?''

The New York Times Book Review

In his first book of poems, published in 1982, Wyatt Prunty asked, ''Is it the ritual or narrative / Of our lives we understand?'' Was that question addressed to himself, or was he perhaps looking for a little help? Whatever the case, Prunty has spent the last two decades trying to find an answer by examining the ways in which human experience is made up of small traditions bound together into a larger story -- the subset of ritual within narrative, one might say.

Some years ago, a friend of mine received a letter informing her that she was being included in an anthology of America's best young writers. Shortly thereafter, she received a second letter telling her that, based on her age (which had initially been miscalculated -- she was in her early 40s), she was no longer one of America's best young writers. The committee was sure she was still a good writer, just not a young one.

To read a poem by John Ashbery is to encounter a mysterious, occasionally frustrating collection of events and emotions that, while they don't necessarily make any kind of linear sense, can be extraordinarily compelling. Even if a line seems illogical -- and there are many such lines in Ashbery's work -- it's integral to the poem in the same way that the random thoughts each of us has on a given day make up the fabric of our existence: Did I remember to lock the door? That woman on the subway looked like my best friend from second grade. I wonder what she's doing. What's it really like to be a policeman?

There is a gravity to Mark Levine's second book, "Enola Gay," the first of three volumes in a promising new poetry series from the University of California Press. The poems in it bear a sense of having struggled up from beneath great pressure to reach the page. It's not that the writing seems labored; rather, the words feel as if they've come to be bound together gradually. In one poem, Levine refers to "a fleet of morbid dreams seeking inland passage," which is a perfect description of the images and difficulties that fill the book. They are at once lugubrious and desolate, and they travel in numbers.

Ah, love. Who among us hasn't hung onto a few of the spoils of romance gone by -- letters tied with fraying, faded ribbon, sappy records, baubles abandoned to the darkest reaches of the jewelry box? And who among us doesn't pull these items out once in a while, perhaps on a rainy Sunday afternoon, to ponder the people we were when we received them and the inevitable disillusionment that led, later, to new loves that suited us better, or perhaps worse?
I, too, am a hoarder of such mementos, and my collection includes a small, tattered paperback that I got in fifth grade, when I really fell in love for the first time -- with poetry.

In his new collection, “Trappings,” Richard Howard makes an old question shine again.

David Lehman made himself write a poem every day, and “The Daily Mirror” is the jazzy, joyful result.

“In a field," Mark Strand famously claimed, "I am the absence of field." Put Carl Phillips in a field, on the other hand, and absence is the last thing on his mind. In "Pastoral," fields and the animals that run through them represent Phillips' fertile vision of the intersection of desire, loss and morality.