Beth Ann Fennelly, Open House,Zoo Press, 2002. Notre Dame graduate and frequent NDR contributor Beth Ann Fennelly won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry for this fine first book. Readers of the journal will recognize some of the poems, lavishly praised by the likes of Paul immer, Alice Fulton, Robert Hass and Alison Hawthorne Deming. Unfamiliar to NDR readers will be the longest and most ambitious piece in the book, "From L'Hotel Terminus Notebooks." This experimental tour de forcetakes its place beside a range of more conventional lyrics written in a number of forms. These poems can be elegiac, passionate, meditative, tender, angry, and funny by turns. Beth Ann Fennelly is clearly a poet to watch.

Jenny Boully, The Body,Slope Editions, 2002. This highly original book by Notre Dame MFA graduate Jenny Boully consists of 156 footnotes printed below 77 otherwise empty pages. One may be tempted to construct the missing "text" or narrative, but probably shouldn't try to do so. Robert Creeley chose a selection of the notes for Best American Poetry 2002,and groups of them have appeared in Seneca Review, Conduit, Another Chicago Magazine,and The Journal.Interested readers of this book might want to look up the author's long interview with Joe Doerr in the first issue of Danta,available from the Creative Writing Program, University of Notre Dame.

Robert Archambeau, editor, Vectors: New Poetics, Samizdat Editions, 2001.In some ways Vectorsis a companion volume to The Possibility of Language: Seven New Poets,which we noted in NDR #14. The essays are by Frank Rogaczewski, Brooke Bergan, Randolph Healy, Mike Barrett, Eric Elshtain, Trevor Joyce, Catherine Kasper, Karen Mac Cormack, and Peter Middelton. Several of these take unusual forms and in fact some of them might as well be read as poems, like Jenny Boully's footnotes. Samizdathas been a very useful and original journal since it started publication a few years back. The Samizdatbook series has begun with two important volumes and promises more to come.

Ken Smith, Shed: Poems 1980-2001,Bloodaxe Books, 2002. The latest collection from one of England's best living poets, Shedcontains all the poems Smith wishes to keep in print from his Bloodaxe collections Burned Books(1981), Abel Baker Charlie Delta Epic Sonnets(1981), Terra(1986), Wormwood(1987), The heart, the border(1990), Tender to the Queen of Spain(1993), and Wild Root(1998), as well as a group of new poems. Readers unfamiliar with these titles will find Shed to be a solid introduction to Smith's highly musical and complex work; but, for a more rounded appreciation of his decades-long career, should not ignore The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (1982). Those familiar with Smith either through his poetry, prose, or popular BBC recordings will find that Shedcontains such favorites as "Hawkwood," "The John Poems," and "The Shadow of God." The section of new poems, called Shed was inspired in part by the shed in Smith's back garden in which he does much of his thinking and writing. Of it, in "The Shed in Question," he writes: "This is the empire of the vampire, / the Republic of Bad Manners. / In here I'm merely tolerated, the delegate / from Out There among the stars."

Frances Sherwood, The Book of Splendor,Norton, 2002. Sherwood's third novel, after Vindicationand Green,sends her back to the successful ground of the first, the thoroughly historic tale. And it's an exuberant one, Prague in 1600, famous alchemists and astronomers star, with spies, lepers, monks, and mountebanks thrown in. Sherwood seesaws between the sacred and the profane, the fanciful and the earthbound, but she always maintains her balance. A surprising, captivating outing, deeply satisfying.

Michael Collins, The Resurrectionists,Scribner, 2002. Collins, one of the first graduates of the Notre Dame Creative Writing Program, follows up his Booker Prize-shortlisted first novel (here in the U.S.), The Keepers of Truth,with his second, set in the UP, part of a trilogy of Midwestern noir novels. About this one, Ireland's The Sunday Independentnewspaper said, "Collins is a chronicler of small Americana and the downbeat drifters that have been passing through ever since The Grapes of Wrath.Six decades after the photographic bleakness of Steinbeck's desolate depression landscapes, there's a cinematic precision about Collins's description of brassy diners, beat-up Chevys, windswept gas stations, and tumbleweed skittering down empty streets." The latest stop on an amazing career.