RonSlate.com

on The Pages, a novel by Murray Bail (Other Press)

Ron Slate — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:08:24 -0700

Murray Bail’s beguiling fourth novel, The Pages, begins with Erica Hazelhurst, a 46-year old professor of philosophy, and Sophie Perloff, a 43-year old psychiatrist, driving from Sydney to a remote sheep farm in New South Wales.

on The Art of Description: World Into Word, essays by Mark Doty (Graywolf Press)

Ron Slate — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:20:28 -0700

Reflecting on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop advised herself as follows: “Portray not a thought, but a mind thinking … The ardor of [an idea’s] conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth, and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it has changed into some other idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any existen

on The Last Skin, poems by Barbara Ras (Penguin)

Ron Slate — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:14:58 -0700

Barbara Ras’ third book of poems, The Last Skin, is marked by worship and worry. Her materials include the death of a parent, travel and meditation, nature and memory, serial wars, time. But it is the profound, implacable tension sparking through those materials that create her distinct manner – graceful or erratic gestures veering between the devotional and the quizzical.

on First Loves and Other Adventures, essays by Grace Schulman (University of Michigan)

Ron Slate — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:04:00 -0700

In From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Walter Kaufman wrote, “One learns to ask about every philosophy and every religion, and about great poets and artists, too: What is it that they praise?”

on Four New Poetry Anthologies

Ron Slate — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:18:22 -0700

The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry, edited and translated by Charles Simic (Graywolf)
Seriously Funny, edited by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby (Georgia)
Poetry of the Law, edited by David Kader and Michael Stanford (Iowa)

on Nothing Happened and Then It Did, essays/stories by Jake Silverstein (Norton)

Ron Slate — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:20:06 -0700

“An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagined,” writes David Shields in Reality Hunger. “We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. ‘Fiction/nonfiction’ is an utterly useless distinction.” A life is lived in secret among ruptures and congealings of comprehension.

on Dear Money, a novel by Martha McPhee (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Ron Slate — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:39:08 -0700

Martha McPhee’s fourth novel is narrated by India Palmer, a 38-year old Manhattan-based novelist with four critically respected mid-list books to her credit and a fifth one nearing release. Two children, a satisfying marriage to an artist, a university teaching job. But each moment points only to the need and desire for money.

on One More Theory About Happiness, a memoir by Paul Guest (Ecco)

Ron Slate — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:18:57 -0700

I turned to Paul Guest’s memoir One More Theory About Happiness because he has written poems like this:

ON THE PERSISTENCE OF THE LETTER AS A FORM

Dear murderous world, dear gawking heart,
I never wrote back to you, not one word

wrenched itself free of my fog-draped mind
to dab in ink the day's dull catalog

of ruin. Take back the ten-speed bike

Questionnaire to the Dead

Ron Slate — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:46:46 -0700

QUESTIONNAIRE TO THE DEAD
regarding repatriation by the Conciliation Commission

1
Do you prefer to return
to what is now our world, whether or not
you could inhabit your former home?

2
If you prefer not to return,
indicate in order of preference
other worlds where you would like to live.

3
If your preference is to return, would you agree

on Addiction and Art, ed. by Patricia Santora, Margaret Dowell & Jack Henningfield (Johns Hopkins University Press)

Ron Slate — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:00:10 -0700

A few years ago, my migraine-afflicted friend Margot submitted a painting to a call for entries. The Migraine Awareness Group (MAGNUM) was looking for artworks expressing the anguish of that condition. A pharmaceutical company had donated $400,000 to sponsor a touring bus-based exhibit.

on The Dragonfly, selected poems 1953-1981 by Amelia Rosselli, tr. by Giuseppe Leporace and Deborah Woodard (Chelsea Editions)

Ron Slate — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:56:14 -0700

In anthologies of 20th century Italian poetry in English translation, one may find Saba, Campana, Ungaretti, Montale, Pavese, Pasolini and Scotellaro -- but never Amelia Rosselli.

on Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with America’s Poets, Alexander Neubauer, ed. (Knopf)

Ron Slate — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 11:17:45 -0700

"There are few things less pleasing than a writer talking about his own work," wrote Graham Greene in a letter to a reviewer in 1960. Fortunately, he permitted himself to be unpleasant, otherwise we couldn’t now enjoy the conversational brio of his 1953 Paris Review interview.

on The Bradshaw Variations, a novel by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ron Slate — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:16:07 -0700

Rachel Cusk recently took up the spurious question “Can creative writing ever be taught?”

on An Algebra, poems by Don Bogen (University of Chicago Press)

Ron Slate — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:51:40 -0700

In “The Moon in the Water,” a poem in Don Bogen’s third book Luster (2003), an actor playing Tarzan “jogging half-naked through the arboretum / is the relic of an Olympic swimming star.” The speaker holds himself above “the soggy domestic comedy of a jungle bungalow” played out by Tarzan, Jane and Boy.

on Don Juan, His Own Version, a novel by Peter Handke, tr. by Krishna Winston (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

Ron Slate — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:55:06 -0700

The narrator of this tale is a former master chef who lives in his run-down failed inn. The time is the present. Don Juan appears suddenly, hurtling over his garden wall, pursued by a couple on a motorcycle.

on Three 2009 Poetry Titles by Terese Svoboda, Mark Nowak, and John Bradley

Ron Slate — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:42:09 -0700

Weapons Grade, poems by Terese Svoboda (University of Arkansas Press)

Twenty-One Poets Recommend New and Recent Books of Poetry

Ron Slate — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:59:42 -0700

For the third springtime, I’ve invited poets to tell us about their favorite new books of poetry. This year they picked titles by Richard Jackson, Ted Mathys, Hillel Halkin, Beth Bachmann, Dora Malech, Valzhyna Mort, D.A.

on A Reader on Reading, essays by Alberto Manguel (Yale University Press)

Ron Slate — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:48:47 -0700

Radim Kralik, the owner of Grapo Technologies, a Czech company producing wide format printers, lives in a 3,660-foot modernistic concrete box atop a converted grain silo in Olomouc, about 175 miles east of Prague.

on Stone Lyre, poems by René Char, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson (Tupelo Press)

Ron Slate — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:36:00 -0700

When René Char died in 1988 at the age of 80, President Jacques Chirac called him “the greatest French poet of the twentieth century.” The writer Françoise Giraud remarked that Chirac “would read poetry behind a copy of Playboy” presumably to preserve his reputation as a seducer, but it’s more likely that Chirac encouraged the anecdote.

on The Stranger Manual, poems by Catie Rosemurgy (Graywolf Press)

Ron Slate — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:43:23 -0700

It’s been more than 30 years since I heard Bill Matthews remark at a reading that a poet must submit to confusion and fear – and not make poems as charms against them. As intended, his counsel stiffened my spine. Who could argue?