“[Brann] is a person of many strong interests. The central chapter of this book, 'On Being Interested,' offers a road map to staying happy: cultivate real interests . . . As an American, my encounter with Brann’s work calls me back to a sense of my own good fortune. Against a keening background noise of lament—over the economy, the climate, the pandemic, the predations of technology, crime—Eva Brann’s bright witness lifts me up and out.”
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Juster is a formalist poet with nine previous collections, including The Secret Language of Women (2002), which received the Richard Wilbur Award. Juster regards the common and the sacred in the everyday. In "Cassandra," the mythical priestess to Apollo briefly surveys her role and states “My beheading is still years ahead. / a blade is always being honed for me.” In considering the violence of survival in our backyards, "Surveillance" offers a subtle observance of jays plotting plunder upon a nest of young sparrows: “they seem to savor / how their prey / keeps quavering / and squittering.” A wry humor giggles its way into the poet’s defense of the Bard in "Untamed Daughter": “‘Shakespeare uses language well, / but could have been, like, more original.’” Sections titled "Outer," "Inner," and "Other" form a cohesive triptych that anchors this strong collection, which includes Juster's skilled translations of poems by Li Po and Rimbaud, and a take on a Bob Dylan classic that is very funny and not to be missed.
]]>With two introductions – one under Stallings’s name and another by ‘A. Nony Mouse’ – plus a glossary of dramatis personae, an appendix and the notes of an erudite classicist, this is a playful yet serious work of scholarship in miniature. It shouldn’t be so rare for a poet to be serious and to sparkle at the same time, but Stallings is one of the few.Read the full review.]]>
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