Yes It’s Poetry, But Is It Good?

Yes It’s Poetry, But Is It Good?

The Soul is a Stranger in this World: Essays on Poets and Poetry By Micah Mattix. Cascade Books, 2020. Softcover, 164 pages, $21. Reviewed by Karl C. Schaffenburg Lovers of poetry will find much to enjoy in this volume, which collects short essays written by the...
Taking Serious Poetry Seriously

Taking Serious Poetry Seriously

Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period by Anthony Domestico. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 168 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Literary modernism resembles the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century: the sick old man of...
‘These Global Days’

‘These Global Days’

The Grail Mass and Other Works by David Jones. Ed. Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Hardcover, xi + 279 pp., $176. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz David Jones (1895–1974) opens his modern epic, The Anathemata (1952), by quoting the Historia...
Homesick for Eternity

Homesick for Eternity

Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era’s Dark Angel by Lionel Johnson, edited by Nina Antonia. Strange Attractor Press, 2019. Paperback, 216 pages, $20. Reviewed by Scott Beauchamp The German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in The...
‘All of time is cut in two’

‘All of time is cut in two’

And After All by Rhina P. Espaillat. Able Muse Press, 2019. Paperback, 130 pages, $20. Reviewed by Midge Goldberg “Without you,” Rhina Espaillat says, “all of time is cut in two.” The best poems in Espaillat’s new book, And After All, are about grief. Espaillat lost...