Alone of the Wall by Alex Honnold with David Roberts W.W. Norton, 2015 Hardback: $26.95 The majority of books I review are poetry, often in translation, because I came to literary criticism via my career in translation. However, I’m also an avid athlete and one of the sports I pursue is rock climbing. While it …
Habitation Collected Poems by Sam Hamill Lost Horse Press, 2014 $25.00 Sam Hamill has had a long and diverse career as a poet, publisher, editor, and translator—his work as a translator of poetry from ancient Chinese, Japanese, and Greek alone would place him in a rare arena of those who have contributed greatly to expanding …
City of Eternal Spring Poems by Afaa Michael Weaver University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 $15.95 City of Eternal Spring is a difficult, demanding book from the onset: however wrongly, we often tend to look for central themes and backgrounding for poets and their poetry, being too accustomed to a Chinese-American poet writing about her ethnic experience …
The Complete Kobzar: The Poetry of Taras Shevchenko Translated by Peter Fedynsky Glagoslav Publications, 2013 €20.90 Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar is perhaps the greatest—or at least best-known—work of Ukrainian literature from the classic period of romantic, independent, native Ukrainian writing. Yet despite that, it has been—in full, and not as a poem or two selected into some anthology …
The Old Priest: Stories by Anthony Wallace University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013 Hardback: $24.95 The work of a critic—be it one of literature, visual art, dance, or music or anything creative—is vexing in the sense that you have to so often set aside to a degree personal opinion while fully retaining your command of …
A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton Alfred Starr Hamilton, Edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal. Song Cave, 2013 reviewed by Mike Walker A poet, perhaps more than any other type of artist, can toil in total obscurity. He doesn’t need a band or a pianist to back his …
Salt Pier (Pitt Poetry Series) by Dore Kiesselbach University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0822962175 reviewed by Mike Walker Dore Kiesselbach brings forth in this slim volume a true, robust, and fully novel burst of poetry—an outpouring that appears like a new crop, with a lot of little things to find in the market-sized assortment …
Sense by Arslan Khasavov translated from the Russian by Arch Tait Moscow: GLAS Publishers, 2012 reviewed by Mike Walker The reputation of Russian literature in the West has long centered around the greats of the distant past—Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy—with little thought given, it seems, to the writers of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Certainly, …