Recent & Notable
Peter Riley, Greek Passages (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009). Prose poems that bring together echoes and fragments from ancient Greece with observations of ordinary life in Greece in recent times, all shot through with snatches of memory and song. A haunted, fragmented, lyric exploration of power, love and loss in a land famous for all three. –Jon Thompson
Dan Beachy-Quick, This Nest, Swift Passserine (North Adams, Mass: Tupelo Press, 2009). Dan Beachy-Quick’s meditations on nature capture the largeness of the Romantics in their writing on nature in a poetry that’s also post-Romantic in its use of form. “A concatenation of sound and sense, of science and swoon, Beachy-Quick writes lines of thought and fracture into an anarchy of form. Somewhere between chaos and its echo, he’s an alchemist, more Dorothy than William, a sparrow, a spider, a little meditator gathering together a love letter to every breathing creature.”—Kazim Ali
Ger Killeen, Blood Orbits (Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions: West Lafayette, Indiana, 2009). In a chiseled poetry of great verve and imagination, Killeen’s book circles around “blood orbits” from the ancients to the French Revolution—and after—to discover illustrative instances for our time. A completely unpredictable read, full of poetic intelligence.—Jon Thompson
Janet Holmes, The MS of My Kin (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009). Using Emily Dickinson’s Civil War poetry dated between 1861-1862, Janet Holmes erases it, making a new body of work that reflects upon our own war-making. This is a poetry that is startling, fierce and finely-wrought.—Jon Thompson.