Click on image to order	Editors Select Ken Smith, Wild Root. Bloodaxe Books (distributed by Dufour Editions), 1998. This book contains all of the "Eddie's Other Lives" sequence excerpted in NDR 6, which also featured a long interview with Ken Smith. An English poet who lived in America during the late 1960s, Smith imagines, by way of Eddie's poems, what it might have been like had he stayed here. The rest of the book gives you some idea of what it meant that he didn't.
	Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love. Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Geoffrey Hill is one of the great poets of the last half century, and this is perhaps his most innovative book. We will review it at length in a future issue. For the moment, we urge our readers to get hold of a copy and read it. Harold Bloom is not wrong when he calls the book-a single long poem in 150 sections-"a great and difficult moral, cognitive, and aesthetic achievement-a 'sad and angry consolation' almost beyond measure."
	Paul Muldoon, Hay. Farrar, Straus, 1998. Muldoon's new book contains "Long Finish," which appeared in NDR 5, along with some new versions of this poet's familiar attempts to deconsturct the traditional sonnet sequence, and a group of poems called "Sleeve Notes" dealing with rock musicians in a manner analogous to David Wojahn's "Mystery Train." The longest poem, the opener, is a dream-vision taking place in a New Jersey mudroom. The book, as The Boston Phoenix reviewer said, "makes hay from the ordinary grass of experience."
	Stephen Mitchell, Meeting with the Archangel. Harper Collins, 1998. Stephen Mitchell calls this book "a fiction," but it also comes close to being a spiritual autobiography. Still probably best known for his translations of Rilke, Mitchell ought to know as much about angels as anyone. His narrator, in fact, has written a bestselling book condemned by the Catholic Church called Against Angels, and is therefore deeply unnerved when he suddenly sees the Angel Gabriel standing near an olive tree "as if he had just stepped out of a Renaissance painting." There follows immediately discourse on bliss, games, sex and other angelic activities, likely also to be condemned by some church or other.
	Debora Gregor, Desert Fathers, Uranium Mothers, Penguin. 1996. In a short introductory essay to this fine volume of poems, Debora Gregor writes about Richland, Washington as a "Landscape of Memory": "I grew up in a desert....[where] the first settlers, ranchers and orchardists were forced out by the government in the 1940s to make way for the biggest stateside secret of the war, the building of the Hanford atomic plant. The plant, though even its workers hadn't known it at the time, made the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki." Gregor's father worked at the plant and his family, like everyone else in Richland, lived downwind: "Wind was the landscape. It had swept out the past; the present was dust. I can almost taste it. . . . Even the dust, though we didn't know it then, was radioactive." In this landscape, this wind, this dust, Gregor evokes a Catholic childhood and adolescence.
	Richard Elman, Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs, SUNY, 1998. The late Richard Elman's twenty-sixth book, a most refreshing of rogues' galleries, for all its rogues are articulate and accomplished. Here is a memoir in the form of autobiography in the tradition of Ford Madox Ford, another learned and provocative man of letters. Elman's book is funny, irreverent, and, most of all, generous of heart.
	Jerome Klinkowitz, Keeping Literary Company: Working With Writers Since the Sixties, SUNY, 1998. Klinkowitz's volume is also a pleasing mixture of criticism and memoir, which is fascinating, revelatory, and tough-minded. It is layered with ramifications, insights, and flashes not just of recognition, but of compassionate understanding. A poignant threnody for an aging generation of innovators (Sukenick, Federman, Sorrentino, etc.) by one of contempoary literature's best Boswells.
	Robert Stone, Damascus Gate, Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Stone, the most American of writers, shows once again he is also the major novelistic chronicler of our country's foreign policy. After Dog Soliders (Vietnam) and A Flag for Sunrise (Central America) he gives us the Middle East in his sixth novel, Damascus Gate. If you travel to Jerusalem you know you've gone somewhere and Stone illuminates where he's been: the novel takes the reader on Stone's own tried-and-true supercharged story/trip through the Holy Land's faiths and follies.