Books

Humorous Poetry with a Deep Core of Seriousness

C.D. Wright has described Roberson’s work as “lyric poetry of meticulous design and lasting emotional significance,” comparing its musical qualities to the work of saxophonist Steve Lacy, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

In this collection, Shelton’s first, he moves backward and forward through time but always in the same landscape, the desert-mountains of southern Arizona, which foster his surrealistic view of his interior conflict. He is followed by peculiarly insistent voices from the past.

Etai-Eken is a legend told in a series, a cycle of poems, which is to say, told in different languages. The action of the poems in the poem is their moving in and out of the legend by the changes of access to the larger legend; an access of the present in the ancient, of the present’s knowledge and experience of it.

In Shelton’s fourth collection of poems, he writes of the desert Southwest, and through it gives his unique view of the world. The poems speak of landscape, marriage, freedom, and death.

First published in 1980, the classic poetry of Sharon Olds’ Satan Says was introduced into college courses twenty years ago, and still maintains a wide usage today. Few first books have the power or vigor of design of Satan Says. Marilyn Hacker described it as “a daring and elegant first book. This is a poetry which affirms and redeems the art.”

The publication of Ted Kooser’s Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems is a literary event of major importance. Long admired and praised by other poets, Kooser is also accessible to the reader not familiar with contemporary poetry.

Praise for Burkard’s first poetry collection, In a White Light“Burkard’s poetics will be considered new and strange to many readers, though Stevens, Zufosky, and Ashbery were scouts to this light-laden terrain. [His] book is a blessing.”—James Cervantes

Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency. Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience.

Shelton assembles the best of his previous work together with a selection of new poems.

“Aliveness is Gary Gildner’s striking quality,” Crystal McLean writes in the magazine New Letters, and thise selection of Gary Gildner’s previously published poems, plus eighteen new poems, demonstrates the aptness of that perception. Accessible and eminently readable, the poems in Blue Like the Heavens also possess great emotional depth. Readers who complain about the obscurity of contemporary American poetry will delight in this book.