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Light Thickens (Available April 2009) Elizabeth Biller Chapman Light Thickens is the winner of the 2008 Robert McGovern Publication Prize “Elizabeth...writes with vigor and soul -- her luminous poems shine like beacons.” -- Naomi Shihab Nye “…what a lovely image with its powerful metaphors of light and death, life and living illumination all inseparable, and the brevity and cruelty and rush of the moment in it. The strain of memory, grief, recurring light plays all through the poems.” -- W.S. Merwin, in praise of Candlefish
“Reading Elizabeth Biller Chapman’s poems is like inhaling draught after draught of perfume, except instead of becoming numb, your sense of smell sharpens. ‘Razor clams lie in the cole, creamed honey of their shells.’ For pure luxe of language, no one is more adept. Chapman’s imagery is stunning.” -- Enid Shomer ISBN: 978-0-912592-66-4 | $15.95 |
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(Available January 2009) Robert Phillips Robert Phillips is about the only living U.S. poet who never bores me. -- X.J. Kennedy There is a wry, self-deprecating intimacy and charm in Robert Phillips’s poems that are not like anyone else writing today. -- Carolyn Kizer Robert Phillips’s attitude is that of the sensitive and isolated modern whose defenses – and resources – are observationally quirkiness, tolerance, and rueful intelligence. His work is engaging, open and accessible, his subjects painstakingly explored. -- James Dickey Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-912592-65-7 | $44.95 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-912592-64-0 | $19.95 |
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(October 2008) Helen Pruitt Wallace Shimming the Glass House is the winner of the 2007 Richard Snyder Publication Prize. In her first book, Helen Wallace explores a range of subjects with lush language and a formal deftness that are deeply gratifying. If there is a presiding theme here, it is the tension between our ‘struggle for precision’ and the poignant fact of the imperfection all around and within us. Whether celebrating domestic life or evoking global concerns, Wallace captures the beauty in what is flawed and the flaw in what is beautiful. ‘So much of what we love is born of loss,’ she tells us. And while the world Wallace renders is a broken one, in these poems it has been honed to brightness on the strop of her passionate sensibility. This is a wonderful debut. -- Enid Shomer Like Robert Frost's, these poems have a lover's quarrel with the world. Their words and music throw light over dark places, and find meanings and leanings in the smallest details. Helen Wallace's first book is a remarkably wise and moving collection. -- Peter Meinke The poems in this wonderful book have roots deep in the old, silent America: Dickinson's bedroom, Thoreau's little patch by the pond. Yet life thrives here in all its gorgeous and messy abundance; there are cheerleaders, tacos, a sixth grade science fair, the ‘sprayed turret’ of a beehive hairdo. These are the loudest quiet poems I've ever read. -- David Kirby ISBN: 978-0-912592-63-3 | $14.95 [ Buy Now! ] |
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Lorna Knowles Blake Permanent Address is the winner of the 2006 Richard Snyder Publication Prize.
"Oh, deliver me from the familiar,/from the old maps and their destinations/that are pre-destinations, nothing more." In this first collection, Blake has found her own way to answer her prayer: she confronts the ordinary in her life and changes its course, its importance, through keen consideration and well-chosen words. Blake's skills rest not only in her blend of colloquial and exacting diction with a sharp ear and enticing music but also in her delightful way of seeing the everyday: "Love will pitch a tent anywhere—…./Marriage vows to build a home." The new bride in her new Eden, shopping the aisles and naming the incidentals for house and family, is a lot like Eve, who "knew the word fruit/but not its implications." The answer to Blake's prayer is not as simple as it might appear, though. Daughter, wife, mother: this is a web in which it is difficult to move about. Ultimately, this collection celebrates the charm and grace that belong to domestic life, the world in which love has built its house. A smart and thoughtful collection; highly recommended. -- Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia, PA Library Journal, August 15, 2008 Daughter, wife, mother, bilingual cosmopolite, Lorna Knowles Blake understands from the inside “dulce de leche,” teenage girls, and closing a summer house. But there’s another kind of inwardness here, as Blake is drawn by memories and dreams into a private realm weighted with unsettling wisdom. “Ordinary?” asks one poem, “What does it mean?” The poems in Permanent Address encourage us to find answers to this deceptively mild question. -- Rachel Hadas
-- Charles Martin
-- Vijay Seshadri [ Buy Now! ] |
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Michael Miller The Joyful Dark was selected as Editor's Choice in the Robert McGovern Series in 2007.
I read Michael Miller’s poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling. -- Richard Wilbur I like these very much indeed – such a relief to feel that someone knows what he’s doing. -- James Merrill Original and lovely. -- Thom Gunn Very promising – in fact full of achievement. Michael Miller is able to express his experiences, his feelings, his longings, very sensuously and accurately. -- Stephen Spender [ Buy Now! ] |
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Benjamin S. Grossberg Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath is the winner of the 2005 Richard Snyder Publication Prize.
Each title of Benjamin Grossberg’s poems might well serve as the name for his entire book, from “Conclusion of a Poem begun by Marlowe” to “From the Shore” and “Renaissance Fair.” This attractive concurrence signifies that however various his inspirations, Grossberg’s exhalations are always from the same lungs, the same brain, the same heart. His is a united sensibility, the kind we usually attribute to “The Time of Myths,” as the poet calls it. This extraordinarily rich and entertaining first book is unique in my experience for its eager and outrageous connections with the masters who enjoyed such mythical thinking – Shakespeare, Whitman – as well as for its daring departures from what those same masters, so lovingly ransacked, might ever have undertaken. Grossberg is learned though anything but knowing, playful but in dead earnest, urbane yet refreshingly pastoral. I rejoice that these poems are in the world of American letters. -- Richard Howard Grossberg writes poems so well-fashioned they appear to have been wholly conceived. (“Artifice is our general burden,” quoth Amerigo Vespucci.) But radical too: in their erotic reveries, and with knowing sadness, the poems here take up classical matters anew and afresh. What a fine book, distinguished in these times for its historical reach and lyrical substance. -- Alan Michael Parker [ Buy Now! ] |
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Maria Terrone A Secret Room in Fall is the co-winner of the 2005 Robert McGovern Publication Prize.
A Secret Room in Fall is a compelling, imaginative collection not to be missed. The poems move easily among their many contexts - history, literature, autobiography, travel, and subtly loving, persuasive portraits. The manuscript opens with an Egyptian queen asserting the tricky ubiquitousness of the dead, and goes on to surprise and delight with other unexpected speakers and odd conclusions. Its people - Blanche, fanciful namer of colors; a handicapped man on a train platform; obliviously happy lovers carting their mattress in the subway; "The Woman Ironing" - all acquire biographies through the situations assigned them and the details that give them a hold on the reader's attention and memory. As an immigrant with an insider's understanding of the diversity of America, I responded viscerally and joyously to "The Fruited Plain," without missing the poem's hints of hopes unfilled and dreams often deferred. Thsi is a rich, generous serving of the fruits of poetic observation, of attention to "voices from other rooms" that speak of realities beyond what can be perceived. -- Rhina Espaillat Even over-familiar subjects like 9-11 are transformed in Maria Terrone's imagination to fresh, intriguing journeys. New York and Italy, modern life and distant history are acutely observed, leading the reader into "secret rooms." Pedicurists, workers of many sorts, artists and widors are all shown striving for some transcendence, some unnameable beauty. Like "a brilliant kaleidoscope, the sea we hold within/will allow us to sail through our own lives,/ unharmed." In such declarations Terrone speaks for us all. -- David Mason This is lively and incisive new work. -- Maxine Kumin Whether confronting heavy matters close to home and family, taking in gritty facets of the urban landscape, or bringing to sympathetic light anonymous, mainly female workers in the shadows and giving each her moment of perfectly articulated presence, Maria Terrone's poems are quietly insistent, recuperative acts of imagination. At times spiced by a wry humor, at times opening to small toughes of rapture ("I rise daily, a miracle"), A Secret Room in Fall suggests a world that is one "dense, resplendent cargo," of which the poet takes exacting, loving stock. -- Eamon Grennan [ Buy Now! ] |
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Nathalie Anderson
Crawlers is the co-winner of the 2005 Robert McGovern Publication Prize.
The poems in Nathalie Anderson's Crawlers explore family, in its traditional sense and as a metaphor for the relationships of the world at large, mining dark and complicated truths. Anderson's imagery is densely beautiful, disarmingly rich. Hers is an expansive and generous poetry - desperately moving, meticulously crafted. -- Denise Duhamel "Don't write about this," says a character in Crawlers - and Nathalie Anderson answers with a devastating poem... Crawlers is like a brocade tapestry: Move in to see the beautiful precision stitchery, stand back to perceive the splendid overall design. All darkness and light, nerviness and yearning, wit and skill, Anderson's macro and micro are matters of both moral integrity and linguistic dazzle; the emotional charge that emanates from these terrific poems comes out of a sophisticated melding of the two. This is a book of big stories and subtle music. -- Daisy Fried Nathalie Anderson's subjects range from the small specific pests of our skins - mosquito, thunderfly, gnat - to such abstractions as her lyric meditation on the power of what we don't see even when we believe we're looking. There's gore and there's sublimity; there's plenitude heaped upon plenitude. Her lines display the precise attentions of darning, while the scale can be multigenerational, mythological. Her language is sensuous, scientific, and intimate, impasto with etymological love. Finally I can't describe this book, but you can enter it on your own, get lost inside its riches, and return with admiring eyes - having discovered, as Anderson says "what words - her words - might do." -- Albert Goldbarth Nathalie Anderson's poems combine great strength with great delicacy. They rise from courage and candor, and they attain - reverberant, many layered, richly musical - a beauty that both contains and transcends their accounts of pain and kinship, wonder and sorrow, isolation and mystery. I admire this powerful book tremendously. -- David Young [ Buy Now! ] |
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Christine Gelineau Remorseless Loyalty is the 2004 winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize.
Christine Gelineau has what I think of as sinew in her writing. There is a fine exactness as well as a beautiful contemplative quality that informs her poems. This is work with depth to it yet she has a delightful sense of the absurd wich sometimes sparks through the serious themes she addresses. -- Ruth Stone Gelineau writes with skill and passion about mortality in its several forms: her mother's death, putting down a young filly, the loss of childhood innocence, the evanescence of "spring again/ that old chicanery," the potato famine's "wasted/ waiting children, mouths stained green/ with grass." These are mature, coherent poems full of energy and underscored with love. -- Maxine Kumin One of poetry's tasks is to encounter pain. Not to resolve it, not even to console it. But to encounter it with a language that will let it be known, and in this knowing some transformation, however small, may happen. The poems in Remorseless Loyalty bristle with such hard-won transformations. -- Eamon Grennan [ Buy Now! ] |
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Carol Barrett Calling in the Bones is the 2002 winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize.
-- Jeffrey Skinner Carol Barrett's poems in Calling in the Bones tell engaging stories about people of the past and the present, stories of events occurring in circumstances she understands well and portrays with skill. Barrett subtly reveals insights rising from the connections established, and sometimes broken, with ancestors and families, among neighbors and acquaintances, and with the land. Her selected subjects are portrayed with compassion, honesty and good humor, with detail, originality and the talents of a fine writer. These stories and their worlds live in her poetry. --Pattiann Rogers Carol Barrett's narratives document the suffering and fecundity of an ensemble cast: a mapmaker, a sleep technician, a man who would eat soap are only a few of the actors celebrated by this poet for their small acts of bravery in an all-too-human world. -- Sandra Alcosser [ Buy Now! ] |
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A.V. Christie The Housing is the co-winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Publication Prize.
In A.V. Christie's highly cadenced, diamond-faceted, elliptical poems - emotion intensified to a white heat by its own refinement - to be spare is, equally, to be spared. Here is the hard-pressed attar of awareness, a distillation of the essential from the usual: "And the garden this time is not about abundance, but the necessary." -- Eleanor Wilner At a certain point in life we might hear the "whir" of desire, like "the constant thrum of the house" or "the coursing of blood" - a sound that undermines everything, especially our faith in what we thought we knew. This is the moment from which A.V. Christie's powerful and unsettling new collection, The Housing, embarks. Get ready for the journey. She offers no "full-moon remedies" but rather the heart's "torments" and its saving "adventures." -- Michael Collier In beautiful and mysterious poems, many-layered and intricate like the anatomical drawings of Vesalius, A.V. Christie creates the housing for a metaphysical realm pulled back from some far-off dream. But looking closely, we can see it's our familiar world, exquisitely delineated: the shelter of marriage, family, dwelling, not to forget the body, our first and primary housing. -- Elaine Terranova [ Buy Now! ] |
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Jerry Harp Gatherings is the co-winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Publication Prize. I have long been a fan of Jerry Harp's poetry, but in Gatherings he outdoes himself. These new poems are formally brilliant, playfully colloquial, and often very moving. I rarely come across a poet with such startling gifts, a poet who fuses great musical ability and intelligence with such facility. Away from the fads and short-lived literary movements, Jerry Harp is at once technically masterful and deeply thoughtful. He is one of the very best young poets at work today. -- Kevin Prufer How wonderful, after so many theme-driven books of poetry, to read a real collection, a book in which every poem casts its own shadow. Jerry Harp is a poet of astonishing range, and the obsessions of Gatherings emerge quietly in poems through wistful, unsettling images, in lines that are tautly metrical or spun far across the page, as if to see what they might gather. --Janet McAdams [ Buy Now! ] |
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Vern Rutsala The Moment's Equation is the winner of the 2003 Richard Snyder Publication Prize and a National Book Award Finalist for 2005. Singular as his poems may be, one never doubts that the author is one of us. In his methods, he has never abandoned the idea of a poetry accessible to a great audience. In his subject matter, he stands within the circumstances of the majority of his countrymen. You won't read about it anywhere but in art, and nowhere any better than in Rutsala. -- Marvin Bell I know of no poet who has grown more surely, steadily and triumphantly over the years. -- Carolyn Kizer There is one way in particular in which Vern Rutsala could and in my view should be an example to us all, an example of how to put to maximum use the simplest things in our lives. -- Donald Justice [ Buy Now! ] |
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Scott Withiam -- Mark Cox In these poems a man, an ordinary citizen, stumbles and plows through the days but doesn't come up empty-handed - he finds the irresistible, that electric spark of living nerve that doesn't stop glowing, even when it is found - as it often is - at the very heart of doubt and confusion. If you are in search of it, read on. -- Mary Ruelfe Scott Withiam lives on the edge of one of the most cosmopolitan and soulful boglands ever - a highly-desirable piece of real estate. These wry, sadly-wise poems use all their wits to turn anger and loss into acceptance and wonder. Their generosity is as original as it is true. We're all coming undone, my friends, but Arson & Prophets makes it feel perfectly fine. -- David Rivard [ Buy Now! ] |
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Richard Jackson
-- Gerald Stern His lines are witnesses of tremendous density and speed of the more ever powerful NOW in human history. As technology had to adapt to the godhead's voracious needs, so the poets have to eat exactly the same spot with even higher lucidity, more intelligence and compassion to mourn, to understand and to redeem. Richard Jackson does it with more inclusiveness than anybody else I know. His writing helps us to make sense. It protects us against suffocation. It bathes our lives. -- Tomaz Salamun In its range of control, in its rich, ruminating prosody, in its capacity to contain all that it imagines, and especially in its power to place the corruptions of the world against those of the heart, it represents a poetry of scale, in fine yet compelling excess, informed "indeed exalted" by intelligence, irony, vision. -- Stanley Plumly [ Buy Now! ] |
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Corrinne Clegg Hales Separate Escapes is the winner of the 2001 Richard Snyder Publication Prize.
Corrinne Clegg Hales writes about the American West, that endless blue-sky hope where we have all waited and wandered. This is a beautiful, bitter book. Its individual, austere longing to live is so evident in every image, every blossom, every mouth, every tale that her litany of broken bodies and scatter of harms seems, at last, no more than the mysteries we have all known and will know again and again in hunger and betrayal and memory's dimming. Her poems, compelling histories, local testimonies, handfuls of bees frozen, then alive, stinging like love, or the furious assaults of atomic radiation, hold our attention because, like a sharper's three shells with one pea, they reveal secrets within our grasp, which are yet never quite possessed. A deft, musical poet, Hales has the voice of Biblical character, passion, restraint, courage, fear, charm, endurance, the very metaphor of desire, here the numinous shadow of what is large and lost and hungered for and evident in each thing so small and fading against that largeness. Readers will never forget this book. Poetry ought to shake us, convince us, test us. This poetry does. I love it. -- Dave Smith, Editor of The Southern Review Corrinne Clegg Hales works inside the liminal zones of time, body and perception. These poems are feverish charts of the blurred exposures of our lives; they loosen and refract the scarred erasures between mothers, daughters, fathers, brothers, sisters and stars. A master of measuring the upside-down wicked weight of death, loss, suffering and the sudden transformations where "everything wants to be loved." A tour-de-force. -- Juan Felipe Herrera Corrinne Clegg Hales' poems are biography of the most luminous kind. As we read them, we're in the presence of events and their inexhaustible implications, described in terms somehow both wickedly accurate and surpassingly generous. Separate Escapes works through lives as flawed and ravaged as they come, transforming knowledge to forgiveness. It is, quite simply, a beautiful book. -- Angela Ball [ Buy Now! ] |
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Robert Lunday
Robert Lunday writes poems that resonate. Those readers reared in military families will be astounded at the chords he strikes, and the echoes of their own lives they will find in the particulars of his. This powerful collection should not be missed. --Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood lnside the Fortress In Robert Lunday's sharply rhythmic poems, the otherness of other people haunts the poet. Others, especially others of the opposite gender, are mysteries, and mystery is always rich with its allures and sorrows in these superb poems. In the dangerous and confusing world where "Whatever last night's love was/burns off like haze," the poet pronounces this benediction: "Blessed is he or she who runs the fastest." -- Andrew Hudgins Robert Lunday has combined a narrative impulse, a desire to tell the story, with an intense lyrical imagination, and the result is Mad Flights. -- Thomas Lux [ Buy Now! ] |
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Kathryn Winograd Winner of The 2003 Colorado Book Award in Poetry Kathryn Winograd's richly lyrical, beautifully descriptive first book of poems charts the passage of a woman caught in the very heart of life, participating in the rhythms of nature, eagerly holding onto what is passing and is past, desperately holding fast to what she most cherishes. Air into Breath is a splendid collection. -- Edward Hirsch With Air into Breath, Kathryn Winograd announces and enacts new sacraments of transgression. These poems boldly, dearly cross the borders between humanness and worldliness, ever mindful of the meanings of the crossing. -- Donald Revell [ Buy Now! ] |
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Robert McGovern Robert McGovern has worked a long while in poetry's vineyard, and it's high time for him to let readers survey his harvest. He commands a wide variety of themes and forms. I'm taken with his strictly controlled and resonantly musical work (see the playful "Do Come And"), and with his formally freer poems as well. In several of his best poems, he writes with tremendous know-how and compassion of his children: see the portrait of a small boy, "Seven," and (equally successful) "For Nick," the latter addressed to the same son nearly grown. With wit and imagination, McGovern succeeds in relating the microcosm of the personal to the macrocosm of America at large. -- X. J. Kennedy Three words run through my mind repeatedly as I read Robert McGovern's Fool: Selected Poems - intelligence, sensitivity, compassion. This work withstands the tests of craft and life. -- Lewis Turco [ Buy Now! ] |
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Jan Lee Ande Instructions for Walking on Water is the winner of the 2000 Richard Snyder Publication Prize. Jan Lee Ande gives us poems lush with "the sloe swarthiness of raven and crow." She pays reverent attention to "all creatures tumbling under the canopy of clouds." Her spirit-masters are Hildegarde of Bingen, Whitman, Lorca, Rilke, but her voice is vibrantly her own. Ande is a wonder-worker, and her book pure magic, poems that discover glory in the dirt of our days, transcendence in the stony creekbeds, angels splashing in the community swimming pool, heaven and Nirvana blossoming here, right before our eyes. -- David Citino Instructions for Walking on Water is an illuminated manuscript that gives radiance to even the most humble insect. The narrator of these poems is capable of sacred play.... George Santayana said a sense of humor is a sense of proportion, and with Jan Ande's poems spiritual wisdom is celebrated exuberantly to the accompaniment of laughter's chorale. -- Sandra Alcosser Jan Ande's well-crafted poems are like a fresh mountain stream that springs from ancient sources. They are animated by a deep reverence for the world, by a sense of mystic awe, by a feeling of transcendental plenitude. They put us in the presence of great mysteries. -- Edward
Hirsch [ Buy Now! ] |
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Philip Brady Weal is the winner of the 1999 Richard Snyder Publication Prize. A powerful account of one man's journey through this world... One looks up from these pages a little wiser, a little more alert, a little readier to carry on. -- Richard Tillinghast The poems in Philip Brady's Weal engage us with dazzling language and intellectual range and a lovely music.... These poems get around: from Brooklyn to Belfast; from Italy to Africa; from Youngstown, Ohio to an empty wing of the top floor of a hospital in Marin, where the poet's mother is dying. One long central poem, "Lagos," is simply brilliant in its multi-faceted, multi-layered concerns. Brady's voice is zany, rough and heartbreaking and Weal is full of wild surprises. -- Maggie Anderson Brady offers a sojourner's panoramas and outstanding depth of field. The poems present themselves as majestic, audible, dangerous rivers with live banks... Weal, a word of contradictory geographies, ranging from common good to whiplash scar, rings here around a hundred years of world migrations. This is an unpredictable, demanding, strong book, each poem an exploration. -- Milton Kessler [ Buy Now! ] |
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David Ray Demons in the Diner is the winner of the 1998 Richard Snyder Publication Prize. David Ray's poetry has always been radiant even though personal tragedy has suffused it. --Studs Terkel -- Stephen Stephanchev, Shenanadoah -- Hayden
Carruth [ Buy Now! ] |
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Little Apocalypse is the winner of the 1997 Richard Snyder Publication Prize.
Wendy Battin doesn't look to nature for metaphors; she looks to it as metaphor. I would say she has a deeply religious imagination, if that adjective weren't now suspect; let me say, instead, that she is, at her best, a quintessentially American poet. She has her eye on origins and ends. -- J.D. McClatchy, The Hudson Review Amid the incoherence of things, between the coarse lines of dissolution, after our last photogenic war, the "fever-vivid" language of Wendy Battin's Little Apocalypse threads between lucidity and lyricism, surface and depth to the very fovea of the song. An exquisite collection. -- C.D. Wright Wendy Battin's poems are the waking dreams of a physicist: elegant, pure, accurate as light. But hers is a human physics, in which the emotional dimension is as present as the intellectual. The language of Little Apocalypse is meditative and playful, while never abandoning the rigor of reason. Wendy Battin is a brilliant poet. -- Pamela Alexander [ Buy Now! ] |
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| War and Lechery-- The
Poem (1995) William Sylvester |
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Harold
Witt -- Karl Shapiro Order this book from the Ashland Bookstore
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Andrew M. Greeley
Readers of these poems will find most particularly a celebration of the joy and absurdity of life, the gifts and quirks given to men and women, and the gifts they give to one another and to God. Above all, he celebrates the love relationship between God and his creatures on the levels of eros, philos, and agape. |
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...Richard Snyder's
careful and caring poems make him, to my mind, one of the finest
poets working today. -- Alice Moser Claudel ...[Richard Snyder's] poems are of high grade and "belong" in print. His exuberance is what I like. -- John Crowe Ransom |
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Harold Witt locates definitely and works with confidence - even with a confiding .... He builds forms... his phrasings accumulate recurrences .... he operates from stability .... But rather than repeating the advertised public events which our time continually forces at us as being alone of validity and worth, he delivers the local excitements which really make up life. -- William Stafford, Poetry The force of Witt's poetry lies, first, in the balanced, sensitive perception of his imagery, and, second, in his ability to set these images in an appropirately lyrical texture of sound. -- James Schevill, San Francisco Chronicle Mr. Witt is a good man to have around. -- William Van O'Connor, Saturday Review |
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A Feast of
Flesh and Other Occasions (1974) |
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Need
(1971) |
