K. C. STAR ANNOUNCES 2014 NOTABLE POETRY BOOKS

The Kansas City Star includes poetry among its priorities in reviewing, a rare opportunity, through the year, to learn of new works by contemporary versifiers. I feel lucky to be able to contribute as a regular reviewer and as a compiler of this list. Nine of the one-hundred 2014 Notable KC Star books are poetry:

Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems by William Stafford (Graywolf), Blood Lyric, by Katie Ford (Graywolf), Book of Hours by Kevin Young (Knopf).  Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf), Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Put This on, Please by William Trowbridge (Red Hen), Wolf Centos by Simone Muench (Sarabande), Woman With a Gambling Mania by Catherine Anderson (Mayapple), Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson translated by W.S. Merwin and Takako Lento (Copper Canyon).

Compilers of this list are: Darryl Levings (KC Star books editor), Steve Paul (former KC Star books editor and editorial staff), Brian Burnes (KC Star columnist), Edward M. Eveld (KC Star); and regular KC Star reviewers: Kevin Canfield, Liz Cook, Jeffrey Ann Goudie, Anne Kniggendorf, Denise Low, Christine Pivovar, Sebastian Stockman and Steve Weinberg. University of Missouri-Kansas City English Department members consulted are: Hadara Bar-Nadav, Christie Hodgen and Whitney Terrell. The list includes fiction, nonfiction, and verse. See the entire listing of 100 Notable Books with commentary:

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article4431734.html#storylink=cpy

Louise Gluck Wins 2014 National Book Award

The National Book Award Foundation announces Louise Gluck as the winner of the 2014 prize for poetry, for the book Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Gluck's lines have spare intensity, fused with narrative momentum. In her 2006 book Averno, she works with the Persephone myth to deconstruct patriarchal confinement in the poem “A Myth of Devotion,” which begins: 

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added. . . .        (See http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/myth-devotion )

Gluck weaves the story within her own meditations on the isolating process of a controlling lover. The connection to the mythic level adds power to her narrative, raising the individual complaint to larger questions of human isolation within an enigmatic cosmos. In an interview with Sandra Lin, Gluck says this about Faithful and Virtuous Night:

 “What distinguishes this book, to me, is the absence of struggle, which has been replaced not by resignation, but rather by a kind of strange ecstasy. It may be no other reader will feel this. Old age, particularly before it produces any spectacular deterioration, is very different from the fear of death, which has been my subject, and battleground, since I began writing in my early childhood.” Interview by Sandra Lim      

Louise Glück was born in New York City on April 22, 1943, and grew up on Long Island. She is a writer-in-residence at Yale University. She is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, over almost fifty years. Her book of essays about poetry writing, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco Press, 1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her many awards, besides the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry, include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Selected Bibiography: Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Poems: 1962-2012 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013); A Village Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009); Averno (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)
The Seven Ages (Ecco Press, 2001); Vita Nova (Ecco Press, 1999); Meadowlands (Ecco Press, 1996); The First Four Books of Poems (Ecco Press, 1995); The Wild Iris (Ecco Press, 1992); Ararat (Ecco Press, 1990); The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco Press, 1985); Descending Figure (Ecco Press, 1980); The Garden (Antaeus, 1976); The House on Marshland (Ecco Press, 1975); Firstborn (New American Library, 1968)

 

 

 

 

 

Denise Low Reviews Natasha Trethewey, Mary Oliver, Louise Gluck and Rain Gomez

My poetry column "On Poetry" for the Kansas City Star is posted online today: “Collections by four female poets touch on cultural identity, nature and myth” I was inspired by the success of women writers, including new books by Natasha Trethewey (U.S. Poet Laureate), Mary Oliver (why does she keep selling so well!), Louise Gluck (mythic lyricist) and Rain Gomez (Creole-Choctaw cook and poet). The review begins: “The beginning of 2013 brings 'best-of' lists and also a celebration of women’s achievements as writers. The year’s first issue of Poets & Writers magazine notes women as winners of 56 percent of 2012 book prizes. Recent books show how poetry is indeed women’s work and how they excel.” Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/01/18/4016097/a-chorus-of-female-voices.html#storylink=cpy