Title: The only world
First published: 1995
Description: Lynda Hull's The Only World is the third and most ambitious collection by a poet who is one of the most dynamic and highly regarded figures of her generation. Completed shortly before her death, The Only World displays the dazzling lyric richness and unflinching examination of harrowing subject matter that were the hallmarks of Lynda Hull's poetry, and that in her final collection are explored in their most sustained and compelling fashion.

In contrast to the safe domesticity of so much contemporary poetry, the poems of The Only World are decidedly unsafe; they confront some of the most pressing social and historical issues of our time - the Holocaust, the AIDS epidemic, and the violence of American cities - and they do so with a ferocity matched only by Hull's impeccable craftsmanship and deep compassion for the social outcasts who are so often her poem's protagonists. These are poems in which the personal and the autobiographical invariably fuse with the larger sorts of apocalypse our culture faces as it nears the millennium.

Hull's muse is not the scrawny, self-absorbed figure that seems to inspire so many of today's poets, but Clio, whom Hull invokes as "the cruellest Muse, blank History, her pages/waiting to fill.".

Yet Hull's poems never engage these relentless and tragic forces by acceding to resignation or despair. Their most remarkable features are a hard-won compassion and a deep-felt generosity of spirit. Hers are poems that remind us again that redemption may indeed be possible; they ask us, in the words of her book's final poem, to "seek/that thing which shines & doth so much torment us."
Subjects: New York Times reviewed, Poetry (poetic works by one author), American poetry
LC classification: PS3558.U3974 O54 1995