Poetry Book Reviews

By Anne Markham Bailey
The Friends of Julian, Norwich, UK, 2011
£7, Paper
Poetry
Reviewed by Russ Kesler

In Cold Stone, White Lily Anne Markham Bailey gives us poems in the voice of a character she has imagined, a fourteenth-century English anchoress named Anne Wyngfield, who lived in an East Anglican village. The poems are careful to include allusions to specific historical events such as the growing influence of the English vernacular on society and the subsequent controversy over Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible into English, allowing the speaker to be both observer and participant in the times. Read the complete review…

By Fred Bassett
Salt Marsh Cottage Books, 2010
$12, Paper; $5.99 eBook
Reviewed by Jennifer Horne

Fred Bassett’s third book of poems is subtitled “a life in poems,” and this book reads very much like a memoir, satisfyingly so.

A native of Roanoke, Alabama, who now makes his home in South Carolina, Bassett has structured his book chronologically in three sections: The Boy, The Man, and The Old Man. True to the meandering ways of memory, however, the poems in all three sections often move around in time as the speaker remembers old neighbors, long-ago tragedies, and childhood questions. Read the complete review…

By Jason McCall
Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2012
$15, Paper
Poetry
Reviewed by Bruce Elliot Alford

If you happened to see the 2011 fantasy/adventure film Thor, starring Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman, then you would probably be astonished at how easily you could notice and understand the vaguest allusions to Norse mythology in Jason McCall’s poetry collection, Silver. Read the complete review…

By Gabriel Gadfly
1889 Labs, 2011
$7.99, Paper
Poetry
Reviewed by Carey Scott Wilkerson

In this parlous time, no serious artist can avoid the question of the relationship between aesthetic commitments and the complexities of an increasingly-political daily discourse. My own solution, for instance, has been to deny politics, particularly war, any real place in my work. However, I fully understand the impulse, and I am always pleased to find someone who wields this sensibility, and its attendant forces, with invention and insight. Gabriel Gadfly’s collection Bone Fragments exemplifies precisely that fragile mechanism in which horror and humanity are held in the transformative flux of poetic vision. Read the complete review…

By Joseph P. Wood
CW Books, 2010
$18, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Alan May

The poems in I & We are confessional (in the poem “I Was a Finalist,” the speaker claims he was contending “for wife ignorer of the year”); grotesque (one poem begins “If I were a lesion[…]”); and often political (see the poem titled “Supreme Court Makes Pact to Lose Virginity by the End of December 2002”). Most of these poems find firm footing in the mundane and the base (see “Middle Class Syphilis” and “The Punch”—which is literally about a punch); however, the everyday is sometimes given an almost mythic or heroic rendering. The best example of this can be found in the poem “Total: A Biography.” The speaker in this poem gives the reader the opportunity to experience his Uncle Hymie’s sciatica. Read the complete review…

By Rupert Fike
Brick Road Poetry Press, 2010
$15.95, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Bruce Elliot Alford

A “lotus buffet” evokes the image of a long table filled with various dishes from India. Just as easily, however, the phrase conjures up a scene in which someone is hit repeatedly with a large aquatic plant. Either image would work for this collection, which is both full and hilarious. Read the complete review…

By Russ Kesler
Wind Publications, 2011
$15, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Jennifer Horne

Russ Kesler’s second book is filled with poems of quiet, steady observation. This alone is pleasing. The poems move beyond attentiveness, however, and into meditation. The “as if” phrase of the title poem appears in three other poems as well, establishing a mode of approach that joins nature with tropes of nature, reality with what’s imagined, the mind with the world. Read the complete review…

By Irene Latham
Blue Rooster Press, 2010
$14.95, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Sue Brannan Walker

Irene Latham’s The Color of Lost Rooms is a museum of art, history, literature, and the long treasured artifacts of the human heart. To open the book is to take a museum tour, to stop and revel in all that is found there. Read the complete review…

By Louie Skipper
Negative Capability Press, 2010
$17.95, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Russ Kesler

It seems most probable that the “tongue” in the title of Louie Skipper’s new collection is meant to connote language, or a way of speaking—the “tongue” of poetry. In fact, in the book’s title poem, the speaker acknowledges that he’s “planned the jailbreak of these words from within, / my scratching of ink.” Yet I couldn’t help but think, as well, of the concept of speaking in tongues—praise and consolation—as I read these lyrical and well-made poems. That religious connotation of “tongue” also seems appropriate, given that Skipper is an ordained Episcopal priest. Read the complete review…

By Anne Whitehouse
Finishing Line Press, 2010
$14, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by P.T. Paul

Down the left side of the front cover of Anne Whitehouse’s book Bear In Mind is a black, orange, and yellow strip of artwork titled “Transit of Venus: Ingress.” Down the right side of the back cover is the reverse image “Transit of Venus: Egress.” At first glance, one might wonder what, exactly, is the significance of this particular choice of artwork. And one might wonder exactly what one is supposed to “bear in mind.” However, within the pages of this book, one might find more questions than answers, as well as poetry that will make one momentarily forget their original questions. Read the complete review…

By Anne Cope Wallace
Summerfield Publishing/New Plains Press, 2011
$14.95, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Kathleen Thompson

A funeral pyre and a vibrant Veteran’s #2 rose: what contrarieties does this book of ninety-one pages hold beyond its cover? Wallace confirms in her brief preface that she has discovered such collisions of “music and cacophony,” their “sounds of sorrow and song, grief and joy” wherever she’s traveled. Indeed her poems in four numbered sections hum along from darkness to light, from grief to acceptance, and from weakness to power. Read the complete review…

By Barry Marks
Brick Road Poetry Press, 2010
$15.95, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Melissa Dickson

Barry Marks’ Possible Crocodiles, winner of the 2010 Alabama State Poetry Society book of the year award, is remarkable as a living document of a man engaged in the quiet heroics and failures of life on earth. Marks doesn’t seem concerned with issues of craft or artificial manipulations of language for the sake of Poetry with a capitol P. His work speaks to a genuine struggle in the face of emblematic twenty-first century ordeals: a computer virus, a tedious wedding guest, a holiday meal with family, the body as depreciating real estate, returning to the dating scene, loving and mourning a lost daughter, doing the dishes, and the impossibly shifting dynamics of human love, connection, and communication. Read the complete review…

By David Oates
Brick Road Poetry Press, 2011
$12.95, Paperback

Poetry

Reviewed by Allen Berry

Drunken Robins is a new collection of haiku and senryu from poet David Oates, collected over the last twenty years of living in rural Appalachia and Athens, Georgia, where Oates is a teacher and public radio host. By his own account, Oates's work adheres to the philosophy of the poet Basho in that he tries to write, not as if he were in medieval Japan, but rather drawing inspiration from nature and the life that surrounds him. Read the complete review…

By Michael Meyerhofer
Brick Road Poetry Press, 2011
$15.95, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Lewis Robert Colon Jr.

Crack the lid on the melting pot of contemporary poetry and you’ll find no shortage of poets trying to do what Michael Meyerhofer does effortlessly in Damnatio Memoriae, his third full-length book. Many of the poems in the Brick Road Poetry Prize-winning volume are the kind of imaginative feats of cleverness that Amy Gerstler has perfected. This good-natured weaving of tragicomic autobiography, obscure history, and imaginative dives down the what if rabbit hole is the sort of stuff that’s easy to like but not so easy to pull off. Read the complete review…

by Janet Johnson Anderson
Mirror Press, 2011
$20, Paper

Poetry

Book Noted

This collection of some 160 pages by Janet Anderson, a Huntsville poet, was compiled in response to the tornadoes that hit Alabama on April 27, 2011. The book features black-and-white photographs of the tornadoes and their aftermath and poems related both directly to the tornadoes and more generally to themes of loss, grief, resilience, and recovery, often from a religious perspective. This book is available for purchase at all Books-A-Million locations, with profits going to disaster relief organizations at work in Alabama. Read the complete review…

By Robin Behn
Spuyten Duyvil, 2011
$14, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Emma Bolden

The Yellow House, Robin Behn's blisteringly brilliant fifth collection of poetry, shows the reader how the inner space of a woman moves as she moves through her life—through loss and love, creation, death, and recreation—with the metaphor of a yellow house, a house which “is the dream of the woman”—the self known and recognized—and at the same time “the dream about the woman / another woman, her/not her, / woke in the middle of, and wept.” The collection is, in one sense, narrative: as one moves through the poems, one moves through the shifting spaces of the house and comes to discover the events of the woman's life which create these spaces, and how the house itself reacts.... Read the complete review…

By Eva Skrande
River City Publishing, 2010
$20, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Russ Kesler

If you think of the flight of a butterfly—unpredictable, jinking and dodging, lighting for a moment then off again into the ether—you will have an apt metaphor for the movement of imagery and story and sound in the poems in Eva Skrande’s My Mother’s Cuba. Don’t look for the personal narrative or the political polemic, but expect instead the ethereal lyric, poems that pay homage to the sublime. Read the complete review…

By Georgia Ann Banks-Martin
Plain View Press, 2010
$14.95, Paper

Poetry

Reviewed by Bruce Elliot Alford

Georgia Ann Banks-Martin particularizes the homiest of subjects, which ironically, charges them with emotion. A splinter is small, but when stuck in your hand, it feels large.

She creates no distance between herself as a writer and herself as speaker. Her voice, which runs throughout the collection, creates a narrative pull and suggests connections. Read the complete review…

By M. Ayodele Heath
Reviewed by Allen Berry

Hailing from Atlanta, M. Ayodele Heath is a unique and powerful poetic voice. In his new collection, Otherness, Heath explores the age-old themes of otherness and the African American experience in a fresh way. However, it would be a grave error to state that Heath’s latest collection offers the black perspective, Read the complete review...

By Joseph Harrington
Reviewed by Carey Scott Wilkerson

Memory is the velocity of a Self formulated in the cracked mirror of art. Joseph Harrington’s masterful new book, Things Come On, is more than an amnesiac memoir, the “{amneoir}” of its subtitle. Indeed, this text is more than a radically-conceived biography in which the personal and the political are fused in Harrington’s mother’s death from breast cancer and his parallel study of the concomitant disintegration of the Nixon administration. Things Come On is, indeed, a new form of epistemology, a fearless crossing of the fold between narrativity and knowledge. Read the complete review...

By Joseph D. Reich

Poetry

Reviewed by Allen Berry

Joseph D. Reich's latest work, Pain Diary, is ambitious both in length and in style. The book consists of two lengthy poems each roughly as long as T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which draw on Reich’s time working with recovering drug addicts and the purportedly Kerouacian experiences of his time on the road. Read the complete review...

By Jeffrey Side and Jake Berry
Reviewed by Carey Scott Wilkerson

Dear Felix*,

I have a proposal and a problem, indeed the two are one. Each is less knowable than the other. And here it is: I’ll write to you in the manner of the post-belletristic bon-vivant and you reply in the corresponding style, a style of correspondence, or a corresponder, a core responder just so we can get to the heart of the matter and it matters heartily or either hardly matters. In any case, let’s write. Because it is the right thing to do. Read the complete review...

By Alan May
Reviewed by Robert Gray

Many of us come to poems with what might be called an outdated metaphysics. We have been conditioned to think that poems are puzzles waiting for their “Deep Hidden Meaning” to be unlocked, that the poem’s meaning is in there, coherent and whole, just as the poet intended. But a lot of contemporary poetry doesn’t work that way.

Read the complete review...

By Melissa Dickson Blackburn
Reviewed by P.T. Paul

Conventional wisdom holds that a cameo is either an oval piece of jewelry “consisting of a portrait in profile” or “a short descriptive literary sketch that neatly encapsulates someone or something” and that a sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines, usually romantic in nature. In the case of Melissa Dickson Blackburn’s Cameo, conventional wisdom would be both right and wrong. While there is a portrait in profile on the cover of the book, it is the one posed full-face—an emaciated figure whose dark gaze and articulated ribcage startle for their incongruity in the cameo setting—that is most compelling. And within the covers of her book there is a preponderance of fourteen-line poems, but these are not your typical sonnets. Blackburn’s poetry startles just as surely as the portrait in the cameo frame startles, but with the same juxtaposition of expected and unexpected, conventional and unconventional. And her sonnets are love poems, but they embrace her heritage, her family, her childhood, and her grown self, while encompassing the influences of her artistic education and experience.

Read the complete review...

By Jake Adam York
Reviewed by Jennifer Horne

Jake Adam York’s third book of poems continues his project of investigating recent southern history. Specifically, in his last two books, York has set out to identify and memorialize the twentieth-century martyrs, America’s own martyrs, of the civil rights movement.

Read the complete review...

By: E.E. Wade
Reviewed by: Bruce Alford

The novelist John Updike, who died in 2009 just shy of seventy-seven, when asked, “How have your aspirations changed?” responded, “The urgency of my youthful news presses less groaningly.” Remove the word “less” from Updike’s statement, and you get a sense of the voice and tone of this debut collection of poems, eyestodewhurld. E.E. Wade, “the young artist,” has something urgent to say. However, she tempers her enthusiasm with straightforward self-assessment.

By: T. Crunk
Reviewed by: Lewis Robert Colon Jr.

The poems in Tony Crunk’s new book, New Covenant Bound, attempt to release some of the humanity bound up in data. Alternating between lyric poems written by a grandson and epistolary prose sections written by a grandmother, Crunk’s preoccupation is not so much the original displacement of one western Kentucky family but the ways in which the single wound of that displacement can expand across two generations.

By: David Rigsbee
Reviewed by: Russ Kesler

Reading David Rigsbee’s The Red Tower, I am struck by the difficulty to categorize these poems. While there are lyric moments, these are not lyric poems; while there are specific allusions to family and friends, the intent of this work is not narrative—not in the conventional denotation of that word. Rather, these poems tend to narrate a tension between seeing the world as it is and accepting it on those terms.

By: Emily Elizabeth Schulten
Reviewed by: Jane Elkington Wohl

Emily Elizabeth Schulten’s poems wash with the slosh and slurp of southern American wetlands. The reader feels always on the edge of creeks, puddles, rivers, and oceans. Schulten seems to be particularly interested in the intersections of water and land, whether it’s the actual bank of the river or the mud on the creek’s bottom.

By: Sue Scalf
Reviewed by: Melissa Dickson Blackburn

Sue Scalf’s chapbook collection, To Stitch a Summer Sky, is full of the lush imagery its title implies. From first poem to last, Scalf presents visual vignettes which weave the natural and the mortal worlds with a romantic flair. The poems’ central preoccupation is frequently the mutability and solitary nature of the human experience.

By: Andrew Hudgins
Reviewed by: Jennifer Horne

Few poets writing today engage so thoroughly with questions of good and evil as does Andrew Hudgins. Since his first book, Saints and Strangers, twenty-five years ago, Hudgins has consistently, unflinchingly, investigated human nature, and why we so often fail ourselves and one another.

By: Sonia Sanchez
Reviewed by: Barry George

Although “Alabama writer” and “haiku poet” are not associations which readily spring to mind in relation to Sonia Sanchez, both her Southern roots and life-long passion for haiku figure prominently in Morning Haiku. Sanchez, born and raised in Birmingham, moved to Harlem in her late teens. At twenty-one, as she recounts in the book’s preface, she experienced “an awakening,” reading haiku in New York’s 8th Street Bookstore. Ever since, she has revered this “tough form disguised in beauty and insight,” the one-breath poem that makes us alive to the moment.

By: Dennis Sampson
Reviewed by: Russ Kesler

The poems in Dennis Sampson’s Within the Shadow of a Man often address big questions such as evil and injustice, as a few random titles might suggest: "Mysteries," "Naming the World," "Brotherly Love," and "Concerning the Suffering of Others.” These poems are more often interested in ideas than in things. And fittingly, the poems are structurally capacious, usually having long lines and sometimes running to four or five pages.

By: Carey Scott Wilkerson
Reviewed by: Jeremy M. Downes

One of the central poems of Wilkerson’s attractive first book, Threading Stone, unravels the title’s mystery, as the Greek hero Theseus is challenged to follow the thread (the gift of Ariadne) through the great stone labyrinth at Knossos. Even for Theseus, this is much harder than it first appears; not only is there the monstrous Minotaur, but the very act of “threading the stone”—through using language, through creating narrative—is called into question by this book’s “rhizomic world” where every thread appears to lead in multiple directions.

By: Alan May; Illustrations by Tom Wegrzynowski and Alan May
Reviewed by: Carey Scott Wilkerson

In a time when perhaps too few poets are willing to explore the ontological rift between language and meaning, discovering Alan May’s book Dead Letters is an occasion both for a new mode of celebration and some old-fashioned investigation of the poetic project itself. This daring collection—by turns experimental and surreal, meditative and poignant—is indeed a powerfully imagined and, finally, astonishing achievement.

By Sue Walker

Reviewed by Celia Lewis

She Said demonstrates Sue Walker’s finely honed ear for poetic language (including the nuanced rhythms of southern speech), an unerring sense for authentic characters, and a command of the lyrical narrative. She sets herself the daunting task of consistently engaging the reader while using “she said” in each poem. A Houdini of a tale-teller, she seamlessly succeeds, never allowing the tension of these forty-eight poems to falter or fail. It is a tour-de-force of word play, brimming with joyous riffs of sound.

By: Sean Hill
Reviewed by: Bruce Alford

The cover illustration of Sean Hill’s debut collection is a striking detail from a watercolor, circa 1939, by Frank Stanley Herring. A crowd of “colored” people, leaning on trees or sitting on benches, blends into a storefront. The buildings are copper-colored and deep red. Shades of red, from strawberry to rich rust, dominate. This is Milledgeville, Georgia, the setting of Hill’s book. Specifically, this is McIntosh Street—as red as a McIntosh apple—named for a Scottish clan whose tartans were chiefly red. “McIntosh Street the sign reads,” writes Hill in the poem entitled “Nigger Street 1937.”
Black people have settled here and transformed the place into something that surpasses the single shade the street sign implies. Now the street is red....

By: DéLana R. A. Dameron
Reviewed by: M. Dickson Blackburn

DéLana R. A. Dameron has written a terrific book in the original sense of the word. How God Ends Us is an exploration through poetry of those terrifying and terrific aspects of life that may cause one to tremble, whether in fear, in beauty, or in love. While God is often present throughout the book, the collection is not simply a celebration of the God that Dameron proposes ends life so much as a searching meditation on the ways of ending and the nature of the human condition and mind as endings emerge into view.

By: Jennifer Horne
Reviewed by: Kathleen Thompson

Jennifer Horne’s first full-length poetry book is as stimulating and breath-catching as its initial promise. The cover art, the title, and its epigraphs are all rife with folk art, superstition, and history. Eudora Welty’s words alone conjure up the image of Cash McCord slinging rocks into a bottle tree as Livvie’s old Solomon lies inside dying—another titillating tale told on a porch aptly framed with southern yard art. And the framework for this book? Oh, no—it has thirteen parts.

By: Hank Lazer
Reviewed by: Sue B. Walker

Hank Lazer’s fifteenth book of poetry, Portions, is a “language house a / moving place that / feeds & carries,” a linguistic portioning that addresses how it is “to be”; it is “a way / to see out / to learn of / the world we / miraculous stand upon” (“House,” “Nature”). The book is an “invitation into a / new way of / saying (“Invitation”) that is in keeping with Heidegger’s claim that “language is the house of Being” (On The Way To Language). Portions is a “secret & saving / way through the / world in a thin book” (“Way”).

By: Robert Gray
Reviewed by: Russ Kesler

Robert Gray’s book Drew: Poems from Blue Water straddles two genres. In its subject matter and narrative arc, it is a memoir of the life and death of Gray’s older brother Drew. Broken into seventeen discrete sections, the story centers around the family’s cabin at a central Alabama lake. Yet that story is told via a series of poems, each section comprised of one to four poems. As memoir, the book is a moving and compelling tale.

By: Mary Carol Moran
Reviewed by: Melissa Dickson Blackburn

Strewn with frequent sonnets and the occasional villanelle—as well as historical, literary, and personal reflections—Mary Carol Moran’s Equivocal Blessings delves into the penance we all must pay to the loved, the lost, the dead, and the remembered. Divided into three sections—“Clearing,” “Breathe With Me,” and “Strong Bones”—Equivocal Blessings features diverse approaches and narrative themes....

By: Clela Reed
Reviewed by: Tony Crunk

By: Emma Bolden
Reviewed by: Alan May

Often in love poems (or poems about unrequited love), we see the love relationship stand as metaphor for something more complex and, perhaps, profound. During my first reading of Emma Bolden’s The Sad Epistles, I was slightly worried that Bolden’s poems weren’t working hard enough, that the honest-to-god ache she relays, akin to the ache we often hear/feel in pop songs, wouldn’t be enough to carry me through the chapbook again and again. However, with subsequent readings, I fell more deeply in love with the poems and their earnestness, humor, and terror.

By: Sue Scalf
Reviewed by: Keith Badowski

The strongest poems in Sue Scalf’s latest book Burnt Offerings are dramatic monologues that go beyond their Biblical sources and imaginatively explore the personalities of the speakers. “The Plain One,” for instance, reveals Martha’s fiery reaction to the “scolding” Jesus gives her. The poem has an angry tone as Martha internally justifies her hurt over Mary’s lack of help in preparing and serving the food....

By: Kathleen Thompson
Reviewed by: Robert Gray

The first thing one notices about Kathleen Thompson’s The Shortest Distance is the blurb by Harper Lee, stating that Thompson’s poems are “quietly earth-shaking” and have reduced her to “a quivering mass of admiration & greed for more.” This impressive introduction establishes high expectations. Furthermore, Lee’s use of oxymorons to characterize Thompson’s work attunes the reader to the many paradoxes and contradictions that pervade the volume.

By: Peter Campion
Reviewed by: Russ Kesler

Among contemporary collections of poetry, many books tend to be dominated by the personal narrative; others employ a more public, politically aware voice. Peter Campion’s The Lions blends these opposing temperaments. In poem after poem personal experience is set against the larger concerns of war and the “baleful knowledge” that an understanding of the world is by nature fragmentary at best.

By: Carol Prejean Zippert
Reviewed by: Bruce Elliot Alford

Carol Prejean Zippert returns to her southern roots in this second volume of poetry, Meeting Myself ’Round the Corner. These poems are about love, community, and family. She writes about her father, for example, who she describes as quiet, witty, and clever, who could solve word problems in his head. She writes about her aging mother, forgetting her medication and “emptying every dresser drawer,” and she writes of her grandchildren.

By: Jerri Beck, ed.
Reviewed by: Kathleen Thompson

Technically a chapbook (less than forty-eight pages), this book contains twenty-seven poems by eight poets.  How invigorating to be reminded, surrounded by in-your-face-tweeting heads, of the art of conversation—its give and take, its eclectic range of subjects, its intellectual stimulation—interspersed with an occasional lyrical whisper.

By: Brett Eugene Ralph
Reviewed by: Michael O. Marberry

In his poem “Firm Against the Pattern,” the first of twenty-nine poems in his new collection titled Black Sabbatical, poet Brett Eugene Ralph writes: “Closing my eyes, I extended my tongue / and pressed it firm against the pattern: / I tasted yesterday’s rain, / the carcasses of moths, / broken glances, tears, / the smoke of not-so-distant fires— / all those desperate gestures / we collect and call the seasons.” These lines, so reminiscent in their focus, set the tone for Black Sabbatical—a collection that frequently hopes to navigate the connections between character, place, and memory.

By: Rita Dove
Reviewed by: Lewis Robert Colon Jr.

The erasure of George Bridgetower from 182 years of Beethoven biographies inspires Rita Dove’s new book Sonata Mulattica, a kind of speculative elegy that appends to the biographies an extended and playfully conjectured footnote. Dove recognizes in Bridgetower a familiar historical archetype: The black or brown artist whose genius and importance, the authors of history seem to have agreed, are negligible. It’s a syndrome that treats some of history’s marquee stars like background scenery, props in the lives of their white counterparts.

By: Louie Skipper
Reviewed by: Emma Bolden

Rarely comes a book with the power to change the way its reader thinks, believes, and lives for the deeper, the fiercer, and the better. Louie Skipper’s It Was the Orange Persimmon of the Sun is such a book. These startling poems present a mind wrestling with the most difficult questions of being—what is our place in the world, what is God’s place in the world, and what are we to make of death?—in such a beautiful and brave way that the reader cannot help but be engaged in—and better for—the struggle.

By: Sebastian Matthews
Reviewed by: Jennifer Horne

Perhaps due to the growth of MFA programs, leading to more competently-written poetry as well as more competition for publication, most first books of poems don’t seem like first books any more. We Generous is no exception. Stylistically mature, with a distinctive voice and viewpoint, the poems in this book, many of them published originally in journals small and large, take us on a kind of road trip, into scene after scene of late-night jazz clubs, rainy bad-neighborhood streets, rural roads, a country church, a vacation cabin, even to “Wine Mart, that cavernous retail barn” (“Buying Wine”).

By: Molly Peacock
Reviewed by: Russ Kesler

The poems in Molly Peacock’s sixth collection, The Second Blush, are playful and insouciant, but also unafraid to look deeply and honestly at the vagaries of human relationships, whether marriage or friendship. And as always with Peacock’s work, a formal element, particularly in this case riffs on the sonnet form, provides another layer of polish and opportunities for joy in experimentation.

By: Joel Brouwer
Reviewed by: Steven Ford Brown

Joel Brouwer’s new book And So furthers his reputation as careful craftsman and ensures his inclusion among the best of the younger generations of poets writing in America today. And So is a lyrical and erudite book in which the characters—and this is a book about people together, alone, and often alone together—live out their lives in a series of changing landscapes and relationships.

By: Jim Murphy
Reviewed by: Mary Kaiser

In Heaven Overland’s opening poem, the seller of a broken-down Cadillac El Dorado claims its metal chassis functions as “a powerful antenna / to draw so much distant matter down to earth.” This image is the perfect introduction to Jim Murphy’s beautifully structured collection about Americans and the faulty, charged vehicles in which we travel.  Iconic figures ranging from the revered to the notorious, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Elvis Presley, inhabit these poems in settings from New York to the Sonoran desert, but their real destination is the past: a turn-of-the-century riverboat, a Hollywood street corner in the thirties, a Bakelite radio tuned in to early rock ’n’ roll.

By: Andrew Hudgins, with illustrations by Barry Moser
Reviewed by: Norman McMillan

When I pulled Andrew Hudgins’ new volume, Shut Up, You’re Fine, from the mailer, I was struck immediately by Barry Moser’s cover design. The choice of print, the border, the faded subtitle all looked terribly old-fashioned, and I thought immediately of The New England Primer. After completing the poems, I went online to check my memory, and I found that the covers are indeed similar. Then I read the Primer, and I knew that Shut Up, You’re Fine could well be read as a parody of books that exhort children to be good and warn them of the terrible dangers of not doing so.

By: Jeanie Thompson
Reviewed by: Jake Berry

The title of Jeanie Thompson’s new book is extracted from a letter written by James Wright. A portion of it appears as an introductory quote: “[The seasons] move, as we move, from place to place. As we move, we carry them and they carry us . . . the seasons bear us.”  This sense of the seasons is evidenced in the rich poems that fill Thompson’s new collection.

By: Daniel Anderson
Reviewed by: Russ Kesler

The title of Daniel Anderson’s second book Drunk In Sunlight suggests an altered state of consciousness. But “Drunk On Sunlight” could also serve as the book’s title, since so many of the poems here reflect a kind of rapture provoked by the wonders of being: “How excellent it is to be alive,” as the speaker of “Aubade” puts it.

By: Robert Gray
Reviewed by: Michael Marberry

In his new collection of poetry I Wish That I Were Langston Hughes, Robert Gray, over the course of thirty-two poems, attempts to do what so many of us cannot: pay precise and appropriate homage to those classic, influential wordsmiths. Whether praising John Donne (“he held holiness at arm’s length yet firmly in his hand”), Langston Hughes (“[he] awoke the power pain and beauty that springs from blues”) or U2’s Bono (“he sings a new song / one man struggling to find what he’s looking for”), Gray dives right into the thick of it—losing punctuation and capitalization along the way, meditating on and incorporating these poets’ own sentiments into his praise of them.

By: Brendan Galvin
Reviewed by: Mary Kaiser

A birdwatcher’s life list is the record, compiled over his lifetime, of all the species he has spotted, whether in his travels or while watching his backyard feeder. But the phrase suggests other meanings too—the rolls of the living, the list of what survives. In his latest collection, Whirl Is King, subtitled Poems from a Life List, Brendan Galvin compiles the poems of a passionate birdwatcher who calls himself a “failed / teetotaler of birds,” and a poet with a passion for locating and honoring what is truly alive.

By: Sue B. Walker
Reviewed by: Jennifer Horne

By: Coleman Barks
Reviewed by: Sandra Agricola

Winter Sky by Coleman Barks is a perfect book for muted December. And winter is the ideal time to dig into books piled beside the sofa requesting our attention. It is the season for the wholehearted yes that poetry demands—“I have often avoided / the wholehearted yes / saying there is plenty / of time. There is not.”

By: Dan Albergotti
Reviewed by: Mark Dawson

Some first books are revised MFA theses, and some are wonderful. The Boatloads, however, is so unified in its themes and in its sets of poems, and conveys such maturity in each poem, that I believe it is shaped more by the author’s obsessions than by chronology of the poems.

By: Diann Blakely
Reviewed by: Jennifer Horne

Cities of Flesh and the Dead, Blakely’s third book, is composed of five sections which hold nineteen poems, many of them long and sequenced. Some are in memoriam poems for other poets: Anthony Hecht, Lynda Hull, William Matthews, and Herbert Morris. Because of this, an elegiac tone runs through the book, but it is by no means the only note struck.

By: Maurice Gandy
Reviewed by: Sue Brannan Walker

“What are words worth?” the poet of The Calpocalypse asks—and the answer is “not less than everything.” Maurice Gandy’s rollicking linguistic “coming-of-age” epic/ poem/narrative/myth/journey/beach-life 1960s-early 1970s California experience is a virtuoso tour-de-force pop-culture history/performance that marks Gandy as a significant poetic voice not only in the Alabama poetry scene, but nationally and internationally. The Calpocalypse won an iUniverse Publisher’s Award and a USA Book News Recognition, and it was displayed in the 2008 London Book Fair.

By: Sue Scalf
Reviewed by: Allen Berry

A good friend and teacher of mine once told me, “Poets have the gift of an extended goodbye.” Sue Scalf’s new collection of poems, Bearing the Print, dedicated to her late husband Sam and daughter Leslie, reads at times like an extended farewell. Using nature as a slate, Scalf explores the themes of love, death, and the hope for renewal. These themes are addressed with beauty and grace, without the slightest overstatement.

By: Barbara Wiedemann
Reviewed by: Irene Latham

This forty-page staple-bound chapbook features twenty-six poems that take the reader on a journey to places like "Kelly, New Mexico" and "The Oregon Coast Near Langlois." With nearly a third of the poems titled after specific locations, it reads on one level like a travel journal, documenting the sights and sounds on the trail.

By: Hank Lazer
Reviewed by: Alan May

In little more than a decade, Hank Lazer has published three very important books of poetry: Days, The New Spirit, and Elegies & Vacations. During this time, Lazer has also made various presentations, written, and had conversations about poetry. We can see this fruit come to bear in the probing, provocative, and essential essays in his book Lyric & Spirit.

By: Emma Bolden
Reviewed by: Mary Kaiser

Emma Bolden, a distinguished alumna of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and an assistant professor at Georgetown College, writes lush, sensuous poetry that explores the territory where intimacy partakes of myth, where the contemporary confessional mode merges with tale and elegy, ode and ballad. In the seventeen poems that make up The Mariner’s Wife, Bolden’s voice, following in the tradition of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, heightens the personal through language that has the precision, candor, and dignity of Sappho’s classical idiom.

By: Louie Skipper
Reviewed by: Sydney F. Cummings

Louie Skipper’s third major book of poetry, a “verse autobiography,” titled The Work Ethic of the Common Fly: Still Shots from the Journey, is a compilation of fifty-five poems, divided into four sections: Prologue, One, Two, and Three. All of the poems, except the Prologue and the last poem in Three, which are couplets, are three-stanza poems of varying length in free verse. Its theme is not only time but the influence of time past on the present and both of these on the future.

By: Jake Adam York
Reviewed by: Bruce Alford

How does a white man from Gadsden, Alabama, deal with a topic that was once thought perhaps better and more appropriately handled by African Americans? York succeeds because he speaks with his own voice. He does not appropriate the language of another culture and remains devoted to telling the truth his way, while not disowning the cultural and linguistic identity of another.

By: Dan Kaplan
Reviewed by: Michael Marberry

“Let me guess: you knew a guy named Bill” is the sentiment that begins Dan Kaplan’s investigative poetry collection, Bill’s Formal Complaint—a group of thirty-two poems, ranging from sonnets to prose poems, that seek to answer one question: who exactly is Bill? Or better yet, what is Bill?

By: Jorge Carrera Andrade; Edited by Ivan Carvajal and J. Enrique Ojeda; Translated by J. Enrique Ojeda (essay) and Steven Ford Brown (poems)
Reviewed by: Juan Carlos Grijalva

Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade is more alive than ever. After reading a good number of outstanding Latin American poets, I usually ask my students: “Who was the most interesting, provoking, and engaging poet?” The simplicity, beautiful imagery, and existential complexities of Carrera Andrade are always among my students’ top poetic preferences. For their and my own enjoyment, and for that of others who do find in Latin American poetry a good companion, this new Spanish-English edition of Micrograms (Tokyo, Japan, 1940), edited by Iván Carvajal and J. Enrique Ojeda and translated by Ojeda and Birmingham native Steven Ford Brown, is an occasion for celebration.

By: Beth Ann Fennelly
Reviewed by: Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

The poems in Beth Anne Fennelly’s third collection “can not / not no longer” (“Colorplate 23” in “Berthe Morisot: Retrospective”). They are compelled—reluctantly or recklessly, sometimes hilariously—to (“not / not”) try to speak out. But throughout its seven parts, including three section-long poems, Unmentionables emphasizes the difficulty of such articulation....

By: Bruce Alford
Reviewed by: Jennifer Horne

Bruce Alford’s first book, composed of sixty-six poems, many of them set in the South in small towns, truck stops, and roadside attractions along blue highways, offers an almost carnival-like abundance of sights, smells, and sounds, an imagistic and linguistic richness sometimes strange, sometimes surprising.

By: Irene Latham
Reviewed by: Bonnie Roberts

The cover art aptly describes this first poetry collection by Irene Latham as an organic, growing, nature-of-life-itself work—the roots, the thorns, the blossoms, the birds.

By: Tony Crunk
Reviewed by: Lewis Colon Jr.

Tony Crunk writes the kind of poems that compel folks who claim to “hate” poetry to admit that well, actually, they like his poems. Crunk’s is a poetry of unlabored images and unadorned language. His new book, Cumberland, is complicated in the best way for contemporary poetry to be complicated.

By: Maurice Manning
Reviewed by: Jeanie Thompson

By: R. T. Smith
Reviewed by: Mark Dawson

Some poets are prolific and productive, while some are merely prolific. R. T. Smith is decidedly the former. Outlaw Style is his fourth full-length book of poems in six years (and from four different, very respected presses). It is, perhaps, his most ambitious and impressive book since Trespasser (1996).

By: Tom Kimmel
Reviewed by: Jennifer Horne

Performer and songwriter Tom Kimmel’s debut book of poems is uneven but nonetheless pleasing. Like a homecooked meal made with much care and some ability, it satisfies.

By: Kelly Cherry
Reviewed by: Lauren Slaughter

In a 2002 interview with Southern Scribe, Kelly Cherry commented that as a young child “even before I had words to say it with, I had something to say…. This need to say what was mine to say preceded anything else in my life.” This urgency “to say” has produced a seventh collection of poetry that demonstrates a range of emotional, technical, and lyrical concerns.

By: Janet McAdams
Reviewed by: Lewis Colon Jr.

Several poems in Janet McAdams’ Feral “retell or refer to stories about feral children” as the author clarifies in the “Notes to Poems” addendum. Upon finishing the book, McAdams’ second, the reader may recall as the most interesting poems those that are referred to rather than retold.

By: Willie James King
Reviewed by: Sue B. Walker

Willie James King is a masterful poet-physician, environmentalist, and surgeon-priest. He attends to the ills that befall the bonehouse of the body in which we live and recognizes that it is at once the mortal frame, our spiritual being, the work we do, and the earth we inhabit. The House in the Heart is a potent poetic prescription that helps right wrong.

By: Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, and Vivian Teter
Reviewed by: Kyes Stevens

Edge by Edge is a collection of four chapbooks with poems by Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, and Vivian Teter.  In How To Recognize a Lady , Emma Bolden’s chapbook ,  the reader will find sharp and unabashedly direct poems pushed and pulled by the lilt of language, and then bitten back to the driving point by words skillfully crafted that show what women are subjected to in society’s written and unwritten rules. 

By: Carol Vanderveer Hamilton
Reviewed by: Perle Champion

By: Nikki Finney, ed.
Reviewed by: Jessica Hume

By: Richard Lyons
Reviewed by: Jim Murphy

At a point approximately midway through Fleur Carnivore, Rich Lyons’ Washington Prize-winning third volume of poetry, an augury emerges, voiced in such a way that both bleakness and hope are held within a single couplet: “The future never is, it dies to arrive. I’m not what you said I’d be, / the future whispers. The future is . . . .” The achievement of tone at a moment like this, simultaneously filled with authority and puzzlement, is pure Lyons.

By: Alan May; Images by Tom Wegrzynowski
Reviewed by: Stuart Bloodworth

The poems in Alan May’s Notes Toward an Apocryphal Text appear as tight little blocks on the page, like columns of newspaper print, or as if larger poems had been trash compacted. I admit I had trouble getting past the seemingly arbitrary form. Then early in the collection I came upon this...

By: Jake Berry
Reviewed by: Sue B. Walker

Brambu Drezi: Words that define liberation, that are beyond boundaries, that testify to the genius of Jake Berry. Brambu Drezi: a Wittgensteinian rendering of: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. But of course there is then no question left and just this is the answer.” Brambu Drezi is an answer.

By: Matthew Graham
Reviewed by: Jennifer Horne

This is Matthew Graham’s third volume of poetry and the sixth book in the River City Poetry Series, edited by Andrew Hudgins. The title refers to one of the book’s two epigraphs, this one from the Book of Isaiah: “ . . . ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.”

By: Janice N. Harrington; foreword by Elizabeth Spires
Reviewed by: Bruce Alford

The entrails of a slaughtered sow, the child born with a goat’s face, the cousin laid on a railroad track: such images make up the core of Janice Harrington’s Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone. These images weave in and out of her poems but never appear the same as the poet plays with theme and variations.

By: Wayne Greenhaw
Reviewed by: Jennifer Horne

Wayne Greenhaw is something of an institution in Alabama, well known for both his fiction and nonfiction, winner of both the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year and the Clarence E. Cason Award for Nonfiction. Now, in his nineteenth book, he has turned his attention to poetry, or, one might better say, has collected in print the output of a lifetime...        

By: Sue Brannan Walker and J. William Chambers, eds.
Reviewed by: Wade Hall

Alabama’s colorful history and cultures have always provided our writers with plenty of raw materials and inspiration for their poetry and fiction, and this collection of poetry testifies to the variety and richness they have found. Good material, however, doesn’t automatically translate into good poetry.                    

By: Grace Bauer and Julie Kane, eds.
Reviewed by: Dwight Eddins

Yeats asks, in a question that is really a lyric lament, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” In the case of the uniquely-gifted poet Rette Maddox, it is impossible to separate the two. His dance was the dance of death in the embrace of the Scotch, malnutrition, and tobacco that ultimately killed him (he was 44) in the form of esophageal cancer, but it was out of this embrace—organically and inevitably—that his poetry bloomed.

By: Jerri Beck, ed.
Reviewed by: Keith Badowski

Poems from the Big Table samples the work of five poets, all members of a Birmingham poetry workshop. The concept of binding several chapbooks together in one volume makes economic sense and potentially widens the audience for each poet.

By: Mary Kaiser
Reviewed by: Russell Helms

Much like the canvas of Joan Mitchell, which “leans so all her drips go down,” Mary Kaiser writes with her paper leaning forward, words too heavy for the task slipping to the floor. Bound within a serene yet austere hand-sewn cover, Kaiser’s seventeen poems weave together a seemingly dissimilar community of master artists. From the brilliant and fleshy images of Velázquez to the curiously sterile yet surreal box art of Joseph Cornell, Kaiser imagines them into a combined reality to illuminate the magic of eternity.

By: Jeff Hardin
Reviewed by: Mark Dawson

Jeff Hardin’s Fall Sanctuary was chosen by Mark Jarman as the seventeenth winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize. The poems are deeply informed both by Hardin’s Christian faith and by a lifelong, meditational relationship with nature.