Challenge and Ambition: Rose Solari Releases new Poetry Reviews for WIRoB
Rose Solari's reviews this month focus on four collections that "challenge and stretch the reader’s expectations in terms of content, form, or both."
Rose Solari's reviews this month concern books that "challenge and stretch the reader’s expectations in terms of content, form, or both." This includes Charlotte Pence's vitalizing Code with its centerfold poem written entirely in DNA, Kelvin Corcoran's The Republic of Song with its tributes to the scholar and poet Lee Harwood, Lauren Camp's soft poems based on visual artists of the 20th century in Took House, and the singular obsession with form presented in Peter Kline's Mirrorforms.
As always, Rose Solari writes with generosity and specificity when recounting the challenges and triumphs of each work. It is important also to note something unique to her reviews: her ear for the music of poetry. Solari never leaves the reader wanting for descriptions of concord and discord.
Rose Solari's is a monthly poetry review column for the Washington Independent Review of Books. You can find more of her reviews HERE.
Solari, while an excellent reviewer of poetry, is herself a regarded poet. Check out her work HERE.
Featured Audio: “Letter from Sligo Creek” a poem by Rose Solari
Like the cover photo, the poems in Difficult Weather are timeless and—unlike the poems in many first books—extraordinarily mature. Although the narrative voice is generally that of a young woman in her late twenties and early thirties whose subject matter sometimes ranges back to early childhood, these are poems of adulthood: the discovery and endlessly painful rediscovery of human frailty, sexual and emotional betrayal, bad love in all its familial and romantic varieties, memory, and elegy…
Listen to Grace Cavalieri Interview fmr. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky
Grace Cavalieri is known widely for her stirring and empathic poetry, collected in her Legacy work Other Voices, Other Lives, but did you know that she is also an impressive interviewer? On her NPR show, The Poet and The Poem, she interviews significant poets from the US and around the world, with an aim of interpreting their lives through their poetry. In her tenure on the program, she has interviewed 9 US Poets Laureate (you can find a list with these archived interviews HERE), including the incomparable Robert Pinsky.
Featured Poetry: “Toytown” by Grace Cavalieri
The name Other Voices, Other Lives, is not purely poetical, in fact, for Grace Cavalieri it is a mission statement. In her Legacy Book of the same name there are several sections in 3rd person omnipotent which aim to breathe the same air as famous women who have suffered adversity. Tragic figure Anna Nicole Smith, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Cora from William Carlos William’s Kora in Hell. All in all they are an admix of Grace Cavalieri’s poetic life, all brought together in one beautiful volume; so, perhaps, we might figure that Anna Nicole Smith converses with Mary Wollstonecraft for the very first time in the pages of Other Voices, Other Lives.
Today, from the Anna section we have the heart-rending “Toytown”