EDITORS SELECT

EDITORS SELECT

Debora Greger, God, Penguin Poets, 2001. Debora Greger’s collage, typical of art work sometimes found on the jackets of her books, is on the cover of this issue of NDR. God, however, features a rather beautiful blue wampum snake from a 1771 Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas. Like the snake, God has become a Floridian in a sequence of five “books” and twenty poems. Two of the books, and the volume as a whole, have epigraphs from E.M. Cioran, who says in one of them that “the poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.” Greger sounds like nobody else writing in America. She writes with formal mastery, wit, and a vision of the world all her own.

John Engels, House and Garden, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Like Debora Greger’s book, House and Garden deals with a post-Edenic Eden, all of the poems about Adam or Eve—picking herbs, thinking back, sleepless, at the edge of winter, pruning lilacs, at the looking glass, etc. The tutelary spirit of this book may be the old “Guardian of the Lakes at Notre Dame,” a once hated Brother in an earlier poem that Engels reprints as an extended epigraph. He shouted at kids and waved an old gun to insist “that turtles be troubled merely to feed, / herons to fly, snakes to dream of toads. . . There is perhaps something to say / in favor of old men who raise / the guardian arm and voice against / the hunting children—who, but lately come / to Paradise, pursue the precedent beast / unto its dumb destruction, and persist.”

Jeffrey Roessner, editor, The Possibility of Language: Seven New Poets, Samizdat Editions, 2001. The seven poets are Robert Archambeau, Mike Barrett, Joe Francis Doerr, Beth Ann Fennelly, Jere Odell, Mike Smith, and Kymberly Taylor. All have had some association with Notre Dame, whether as undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty. All have also been associated with NDR as contributors or, in two cases, managing editors. This does not mean the book is parochial or only of local interest; far from it. These seven poets, all very different from one another in style and subject matter, are well worth any reader’s attention. Only now beginning to publish first volumes of their own, they have given Roessner the best of their early work for this fine anthology

Heather McHugh, editor, New Voices: University & College Poetry Prizes. This is the eighth edition of the Academy of American Poets’ anthology and represents the years 1989 to 1998. The Academy sponsors annual contests at many American universities and from time to time gathers together what a particular editor takes to be the best of the winning poems. Although many of these poems were written by undergraduates, one is constantly surprised by how good they are. The judges are a who’s who of contemporary poetry—Heaney, Howard, Strand, Pinsky, Hollander, Shapiro, et. al., and the universities range from east to west, from Harvard to Berkeley. McHugh’s introduction is witty and smart and patient—she must have read a lot of bad poems while picking out these good ones. Like the Roessner anthology, this book promises excellent things for the future. In fact the contributors’ notes suggest that, since 1989, many of these poets have already begun to realize the promise implicit in their student work.

Jeremy Hooker, Welsh Journal, Seren, 2001. NDR contributor Jeremy Hooker has published a fascinating journal of his years spent in rural Llangwyryfon during the 1970s. This period saw the birth of his two children, the composition of his early poetry, and the beginnings of his critical work on Anglo-Welsh literature. Along the way he deals movingly with his periods of severe depression and his isolation from the Welsh-speaking community. This is the perfect companion volume to Hooker’s Imaging Wales: A View of Modern Welsh Writing in English, published by the University of Wales Press. Hooker has long been one of the best critics of writers like David Jones, John Cowper Powys, R.S. Thomas, and others taken up in this useful book.

Geoffrey Hill, The Orchards of Syon, Counterpoint, 2002. This remarkable volume completes a trilogy of long poems begun with The Triumph of Love (1998) and continued in Speech! Speech! (2000). One of the most fastidious and least prolific of modern British masters has rapidly produced during his decade in America a trilogy of Dantesque scope and ambition. It is difficult, thinking of the three books together, to name poets from either side of the Atlantic who are doing work of equal stature. NDR 12 promised a review of Speech! Speech! The now-prolific Hill has moved faster than we have, but we project a review of both Speech! Speech! and the new volume in NDR 15.

Molly Hoekstra, Upstream, Tudor Publishers, 2001. A first novel on an often-visited contemporary subject, teenage anorexia, told with an uncommon steadiness and cumulative power. A clear-eyed treatment of the apparatus of recovery, full of insights and understanding, by a young writer trusting both her experience and her ability to recreate painful dilemmas and salubrious outcomes.

	Debora Greger, God, Penguin Poets, 2001. Debora Greger’s collage, typical of art work sometimes found on the jackets of her books, is on the cover of this issue of NDR. God, however, features a rather beautiful blue wampum snake from a 1771 Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas. Like the snake, God has become a Floridian in a sequence of five “books” and twenty poems. Two of the books, and the volume as a whole, have epigraphs from E.M. Cioran, who says in one of them that “the poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.” Greger sounds like nobody else writing in America. She writes with formal mastery, wit, and a vision of the world all her own.
	John Engels, House and Garden, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Like Debora Greger’s book, House and Garden deals with a post-Edenic Eden, all of the poems about Adam or Eve—picking herbs, thinking back, sleepless, at the edge of winter, pruning lilacs, at the looking glass, etc. The tutelary spirit of this book may be the old “Guardian of the Lakes at Notre Dame,” a once hated Brother in an earlier poem that Engels reprints as an extended epigraph. He shouted at kids and waved an old gun to insist “that turtles be troubled merely to feed, / herons to fly, snakes to dream of toads. . . There is perhaps something to say / in favor of old men who raise / the guardian arm and voice against / the hunting children—who, but lately come / to Paradise, pursue the precedent beast / unto its dumb destruction, and persist.”
	Jeffrey Roessner, editor, The Possibility of Language: Seven New Poets, Samizdat Editions, 2001. The seven poets are Robert Archambeau, Mike Barrett, Joe Francis Doerr, Beth Ann Fennelly, Jere Odell, Mike Smith, and Kymberly Taylor. All have had some association with Notre Dame, whether as undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty. All have also been associated with NDR as contributors or, in two cases, managing editors. This does not mean the book is parochial or only of local interest; far from it. These seven poets, all very different from one another in style and subject matter, are well worth any reader’s attention. Only now beginning to publish first volumes of their own, they have given Roessner the best of their early work for this fine anthology
	Heather McHugh, editor, New Voices: University & College Poetry Prizes. This is the eighth edition of the Academy of American Poets’ anthology and represents the years 1989 to 1998. The Academy sponsors annual contests at many American universities and from time to time gathers together what a particular editor takes to be the best of the winning poems. Although many of these poems were written by undergraduates, one is constantly surprised by how good they are. The judges are a who’s who of contemporary poetry—Heaney, Howard, Strand, Pinsky, Hollander, Shapiro, et. al., and the universities range from east to west, from Harvard to Berkeley. McHugh’s introduction is witty and smart and patient—she must have read a lot of bad poems while picking out these good ones. Like the Roessner anthology, this book promises excellent things for the future. In fact the contributors’ notes suggest that, since 1989, many of these poets have already begun to realize the promise implicit in their student work.
	Jeremy Hooker, Welsh Journal, Seren, 2001. NDR contributor Jeremy Hooker has published a fascinating journal of his years spent in rural Llangwyryfon during the 1970s. This period saw the birth of his two children, the composition of his early poetry, and the beginnings of his critical work on Anglo-Welsh literature. Along the way he deals movingly with his periods of severe depression and his isolation from the Welsh-speaking community. This is the perfect companion volume to Hooker’s Imaging Wales: A View of Modern Welsh Writing in English, published by the University of Wales Press. Hooker has long been one of the best critics of writers like David Jones, John Cowper Powys, R.S. Thomas, and others taken up in this useful book.
	Geoffrey Hill, The Orchards of Syon, Counterpoint, 2002. This remarkable volume completes a trilogy of long poems begun with The Triumph of Love (1998) and continued in Speech! Speech! (2000). One of the most fastidious and least prolific of modern British masters has rapidly produced during his decade in America a trilogy of Dantesque scope and ambition. It is difficult, thinking of the three books together, to name poets from either side of the Atlantic who are doing work of equal stature. NDR 12 promised a review of Speech! Speech! The now-prolific Hill has moved faster than we have, but we project a review of both Speech! Speech! and the new volume in NDR 15.
	Molly Hoekstra, Upstream, Tudor Publishers, 2001. A first novel on an often-visited contemporary subject, teenage anorexia, told with an uncommon steadiness and cumulative power. A clear-eyed treatment of the apparatus of recovery, full of insights and understanding, by a young writer trusting both her experience and her ability to recreate painful dilemmas and salubrious outcomes.