Excerpts

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Excerpts

Excerpts from reviews and essays appearing in the Century of the Millennium Issue (#18)

...to be released soon

Excerpts from reviews appearing in the Irene Liotis Issue (#17)

One Women's Poetry
A review of Josephine Jacobsen, The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticism, And Occasional Prose, Elizabeth Spires, ed., The University of Michigan Press, 1997, 208 pages, $29.95.
-Rosemary Klein.

Nothing about the packaging of this book suggests the range of delights and perspicuity that awaits the person who reads it from first page to last. This volume is one of a long list in The University of Michigan Press' Poets On Poetry series and carries the unwieldly but still not wholly accurate title Josephine Jacobsen, The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticism, And Occasional Prose. Lectures and a memoir comprise the first section; reviews and criticism the second, short prose pieces the third, poems and an interview the fourth. Throughout Jacobsen reveals herself as a person of whom there remain few today; she is a passionate believer in poetry. That passion evolves from her relationship in general with language. In each form she addresses, she discloses herself as a lover of words, one capable of using them with keen, astute awareness to record the fullness and ambiguity of knowledge embedded in societies and cultures.

We Need Not Travel Far To Be In Foreign Parts
A review of In Foreign Parts, arts & stories by Elizabeth Stevens, 120 pages, Birch Brook Press, PO Box 81, Delhi, NY, 13753, $18.
-Del Marbrook

The editing, design and production values of this softcover letterpress edition are impeccable-just the sort of individualistic work of which publishing by posse in Manhattan is not longer capable. This is the sort of collaboration of author and editor we look to the best small presses to provide, since it is no longer forthcoming from the big publishers. Stevens' art is at once childlike and sophisticated, sometimes recalling Blake, at other times seeming like illustrations for a child's book.

Lighter Than Air
A review of Sojourner, So to Speak, Joseph Somoza, La ALAMEDA Press, 1998, 98 pages, $12.
-Michael Fallon

The poems move by association and are made to resemble the stream of consciousness as we experience it, the only now we can know. We are afloat in the stream but never stay in any one place for long, as the word "sojourn" means a brief or temporary stay. In a way, these poems are the natural descendants of confessional poetry, where the intimate, ordinary subject matter of the poet's life is the material from which the work is made. But they do not seek out or dwell on the painful or tragic, and they are not interested in the sensational or in displays of anger, agony or passion. They're are too calm and detached for this. They are whimsical, full of puns, mildly ironic; at times wise; at times lyrically beautiful in an understated way. Take, for example, the poem "Galleon" in which the poet, seated at his desk and surveying the objects on his desktop, comes upon a photo of his wife on the wall above it:

..................... ...Jill
has such a vulnerable, girlish look
inside the photo on the wall.
My wall. Our wall. this room
now passing through the summer.
Like a galleon. On which
we booked continuous passage
through the four seasons
years ago.

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