EDITORS SELECT

John Biguenet, The Torturer's Apprentice, Ecco/HarperCollins, 2001. Biguenet's first collection of short stories, a late, long-developing fictional debut, profits mightily from his deep erudition and his patience. These tales abound in intelligence and delight and an imagination released upon subjects whose familiarities are turned on their heads. Their curt, direct titles ("My Slave," "The Open Curtain, "I Am Not a Jew," "The Vulgar Soul," "Do Me") signal the clarity at the heart of these elegant constructions.

David Huddle, Not: a Trio, Notre Dame Press, 2000. Distinguished short-story writer Huddle's sequence of three related stories, taken together, form a novel in the making. The two shorter sections are buttressed by a novella-length tale ("Not") written in short fragments. Small-town society in contemporary Vermont captured by one of the leading diagnosticians of life, love and social mores.

Jay Neugeboren, Big Man, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Neugeboren's first novel, published in 1966, just brought back into print, his story of the east-coast college basketball scandals of the 1950s. Praised as "The best novel ever written about basketball" (James Michener) when published, the young Neugeboren's anger and acuity still resonate through the decades come and gone. A startling look into the past that is just around the corner.

R.D. Skillings, Obsidian, Arts End Books, 2001. Subtitled "An Epic Tale of Provincetown," NDR contributor Skillings' short novel (his first) is set in the early 70s, the Vietnam war distant, dangerous, and disillusioning. But, in Provincetown, during its last pre-AIDS years, it is another story altogether, where jokesters, savants, jacks of all arts, addicts and greenhorns, compete for love and sanity. Skillings' elegiac and luscious prose makes this short wonder a treasure.

Kwame Dawes, Midland. Ohio University Press, 2001. This fine volume of poems by was chosen for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize by Eavan Boland who calls it "a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance. . .The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging." Dawes, who was born in Ghana and grew up in Jamaica, has lived in Canada, England, and America, where he now teaches at the University of South Carolina. He has published five previous volumes of poetry, one of which was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize. World Literature Today calls Dawes' work "poetry as it ought to be written. . . unshakable and unstoppable."

Dana Gioia, Nosferatu: An Opera Libretto. Graywolf Press, 2001. This fascinating text is the libretto for an opera by Alva Henderson which will soon be staged in New York. Based on F.W. Murnau's famous 1922 silent vampire film, the subject is a natural for opera. The book includes a foreword by Anne Williams dealing with the figure of the vampire from Byron through Bram Stoker to Gioia himself, arguing that Gioia "liberates the vampire from the shadow of Dracula through the medium of a silent film." Gioia himself contributes a long essay as an afterword called "Sotto Voce: Notes on the Libretto as a Literary Form," which is an attempt to write a poetics for a fascinating but little-understood genre. A bit of Henderson's score is available on a preview-CD from Contact Corbett Arts Management. The verse seems persuasive when sung. This may be one of the best libretti since the Auden-Kallman The Rake's Progress and Alice Goodman's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. It is also persuasive as a dramatic poem to be read on the page.

Michael S. Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems. University of Illinois Press, 2000. This long book represents a body of work that should be known by all readers of American poetry. Harper is represented by good poems in most of the major anthologies, but anthologies do not have room for his longer poems or sequences, and these are impressive. Also, his work gains by being read at length; we enter a verbal, social, historical, musical world. Music, especially jazz, is central to Harper's work. The famous "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" comes early in the volume and the recent "A Coltrane Poem: September 23, 1998" ends it. There is plenty of useful, and not pedantic, back-matter: a note "To the Reader," a statement called "Notes on Form and Fictions," and a gloss of important and repeating allusions. Diane Theil will review the volume in a future issue of NDR.

Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech! Counterpoint, 2000. With publication of this book by British poet Geoffrey Hill, one begins to weigh the poet's American career against the earlier, British, publications in some of the same ways that critics are inclined to measure "early Auden" against "later Auden." Hill has resided mainly in Boston for more than a decade and the influence of his life in this country has finally begun to show: Speech! Speech! would never have been written in Cambridge or Leeds. While continuities with the earlier work are clear enough, the change not only in Hill's style, but perhaps even in his poetics, is important. NDR's reviewer of Hill's last book, The Triumph of Love, clearly favored "early" Hill over "later"; so too does NDR contributor and regular critic of Hill, William Logan. But we editors at NDR find this recent book by Hill, like The Triumph of Love before it, exploratory, risky, brave, and stylistically electric. We will in due course review the volume properly here.

James Schevill New and Selected Poems. Swallow Press, 2000. Schevill's early work was praised by William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell, and one can see why. The poems manifest both the edgy American speech of the former and the formal control of the latter. About a third of the book consists of new poems, including the ambitious Rembrandt Confrontation." For the rest, Schevill provides a judicious selection from earlier books like Private Dooms and Public Destinations, The Stalingrad Elegies, Violence and Glory, Ambiguous Dancers of Fame, and The Complete American Fantasies. Schevill has had a long and distinguished career, and his work deserves to be better known. This intelligent and manageable selection should help.

	John Biguenet, The Torturer's Apprentice, Ecco/HarperCollins, 2001. Biguenet's first collection of short stories, a late, long-developing fictional debut, profits mightily from his deep erudition and his patience. These tales abound in intelligence and delight and an imagination released upon subjects whose familiarities are turned on their heads. Their curt, direct titles ("My Slave," "The Open Curtain, "I Am Not a Jew," "The Vulgar Soul," "Do Me") signal the clarity at the heart of these elegant constructions.
	David Huddle, Not: a Trio, Notre Dame Press, 2000. Distinguished short-story writer Huddle's sequence of three related stories, taken together, form a novel in the making. The two shorter sections are buttressed by a novella-length tale ("Not") written in short fragments. Small-town society in contemporary Vermont captured by one of the leading diagnosticians of life, love and social mores.
	Jay Neugeboren, Big Man, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Neugeboren's first novel, published in 1966, just brought back into print, his story of the east-coast college basketball scandals of the 1950s. Praised as "The best novel ever written about basketball" (James Michener) when published, the young Neugeboren's anger and acuity still resonate through the decades come and gone. A startling look into the past that is just around the corner.
	R.D. Skillings, Obsidian, Arts End Books, 2001. Subtitled "An Epic Tale of Provincetown," NDR contributor Skillings' short novel (his first) is set in the early 70s, the Vietnam war distant, dangerous, and disillusioning. But, in Provincetown, during its last pre-AIDS years, it is another story altogether, where jokesters, savants, jacks of all arts, addicts and greenhorns, compete for love and sanity. Skillings' elegiac and luscious prose makes this short wonder a treasure.
	Kwame Dawes, Midland. Ohio University Press, 2001. This fine volume of poems by was chosen for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize by Eavan Boland who calls it "a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance. . .The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging." Dawes, who was born in Ghana and grew up in Jamaica, has lived in Canada, England, and America, where he now teaches at the University of South Carolina. He has published five previous volumes of poetry, one of which was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize. World Literature Today calls Dawes' work "poetry as it ought to be written. . . unshakable and unstoppable."
	Dana Gioia, Nosferatu: An Opera Libretto. Graywolf Press, 2001. This fascinating text is the libretto for an opera by Alva Henderson which will soon be staged in New York. Based on F.W. Murnau's famous 1922 silent vampire film, the subject is a natural for opera. The book includes a foreword by Anne Williams dealing with the figure of the vampire from Byron through Bram Stoker to Gioia himself, arguing that Gioia "liberates the vampire from the shadow of Dracula through the medium of a silent film." Gioia himself contributes a long essay as an afterword called "Sotto Voce: Notes on the Libretto as a Literary Form," which is an attempt to write a poetics for a fascinating but little-understood genre. A bit of Henderson's score is available on a preview-CD from Contact Corbett Arts Management. The verse seems persuasive when sung. This may be one of the best libretti since the Auden-Kallman The Rake's Progress and Alice Goodman's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. It is also persuasive as a dramatic poem to be read on the page.
	Michael S. Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems. University of Illinois Press, 2000. This long book represents a body of work that should be known by all readers of American poetry. Harper is represented by good poems in most of the major anthologies, but anthologies do not have room for his longer poems or sequences, and these are impressive. Also, his work gains by being read at length; we enter a verbal, social, historical, musical world. Music, especially jazz, is central to Harper's work. The famous "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" comes early in the volume and the recent "A Coltrane Poem: September 23, 1998" ends it. There is plenty of useful, and not pedantic, back-matter: a note "To the Reader," a statement called "Notes on Form and Fictions," and a gloss of important and repeating allusions. Diane Theil will review the volume in a future issue of NDR.
	Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech! Counterpoint, 2000. With publication of this book by British poet Geoffrey Hill, one begins to weigh the poet's American career against the earlier, British, publications in some of the same ways that critics are inclined to measure "early Auden" against "later Auden." Hill has resided mainly in Boston for more than a decade and the influence of his life in this country has finally begun to show: Speech! Speech! would never have been written in Cambridge or Leeds. While continuities with the earlier work are clear enough, the change not only in Hill's style, but perhaps even in his poetics, is important. NDR's reviewer of Hill's last book, The Triumph of Love, clearly favored "early" Hill over "later"; so too does NDR contributor and regular critic of Hill, William Logan. But we editors at NDR find this recent book by Hill, like The Triumph of Love before it, exploratory, risky, brave, and stylistically electric. We will in due course review the volume properly here.
	James Schevill New and Selected Poems. Swallow Press, 2000. Schevill's early work was praised by William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell, and one can see why. The poems manifest both the edgy American speech of the former and the formal control of the latter. About a third of the book consists of new poems, including the ambitious Rembrandt Confrontation." For the rest, Schevill provides a judicious selection from earlier books like Private Dooms and Public Destinations, The Stalingrad Elegies, Violence and Glory, Ambiguous Dancers of Fame, and The Complete American Fantasies. Schevill has had a long and distinguished career, and his work deserves to be better known. This intelligent and manageable selection should help.