It is rare to find poetry so determined to cast aside the notion of comfort through faith, yet so successful at conveying the fragility and fortitude of the human soul. In this impressive first collection, chosen by Philip Levine as the winner of the Katharine A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Mead creates an emotional center by chronicling a father's heroin addiction in painful detail, and continues through other narratives of substance abuse, extremity, and grave personal darkness. Mixing prayer and trouble, high art and fractured lives, these poems teeter brilliantly, frighteningly, away from the pastoral and toward the abyss. Lehman's third book of poems is about failed marriage and romantic dreams gone bad-both skillfully linked to American dreams, American wanderlust. Over-identification with the drowned boy becomes both fantasy and terror for the personae in Lehman's poems.
Manifest destiny is full of grim consequences.
The most American thing he can think of is leaving. . . The imagination at work in this compelling new book is both subtle in its particulars and vastly comprehensive. John Felstiner's scrupulously researched book seeks to trace the agonizing predicament of a writer whose mother tongue is also the language of his parents' murderers. Unfortunately, Felstiner attempts to combine biography and textual commentary with his own versions of Celan's difficult poetry. Felstiner's translations fall short of those in Michael Hamburger's English edition of Celan.