More on: Poetry

“A low prairie wind whistles through B.H. Fairchild’s new volume of poetry,” writes one critic of Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest. The prairie metaphor, drawn from the landscape that the poet knew growing up in Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma, is a perfect analogue for his literary genius. Fairchild’s poetry, like the prairie,…

For most people nowadays, literary critics are suspect: they’ve deconstructed so much that we’re not sure we want to be in the same room with them. Peggy Rosenthal is different. She’s got all the classic hallmarks of a great critic: lucid and enthusiastic, she sends you back to the original material armed with passion and knowledge.…

Kelly LeFave’s poems are people you’d like to know: well-rounded, welcoming, and possessed of the elusive combination of polish and volubility. They balance self-revelation with mystery, frankness with poise. Her language is shockingly vivid, playful, in love with sound—but also with image and story. Her scope ranges from ancient to modern, popular to sacred, her modes…

In “The Mona Lisa as Self Portrait,” Robert Cording writes a poem about the mysterious process whereby the artist begins with the subjective self and seeks, through the crafting of a work of art, to lose the self in homage to the other. The tension between self and world is an ancient one in art, and…

It’s a special pleasure for us to feature one of our own as the Artist of the Month. It was Bill Coleman who first came up with the idea of this feature for the Image website when he was working as Image’s Managing Editor from 1998 to 2000. Like every ME who has worked for Image,…

Stephanie Strickland’s poetry is brainy without being cold. Her poems are spare, accurate, pure. Originating in the realm of thought, and living out their life there, they remain fiercely and intimately connected with human experience, not because Strickland writes about physical thing—-she hardly ever does—but because of her passion for precision, for making language bear…

Jeanine Hathaway’s poems are earthy, grounded in the physical, playful, but also haunted by glimpses of transcendence. Weighted with history but never overawed by it, her work makes the ancient and contemporary equally real; their juxtaposition is at once gorgeous and unsettling. At the heart of her poetry is the intuition that doubt—even chronic, unsettling doubt—is…

Kate Daniels is a poet with a breathtaking range of interests and voices. She is able to give a voice to the passionate, ascetic intellectual Simone Weil and also write of the domestic felicities (and infelicities) of marriage, child-bearing, and child-raising. Daniels enters the most emotionally vertiginous experiences (earthquake, suicide, divorce, the death of children)…

Mark Jarman probably wouldn’t think of himself this way, but he is a courageous man. And courage is a rare commodity at any time, and especially so in the small, competitive world of American literary culture. As a champion of the formalist tradition in poetry and as a writer unafraid to place religious faith and doubt…

John Terpstra clearly fits the definition of a Renaissance man: poet, cabinetmaker, woodworker, and collaborator on a variety of multimedia projects involving music, worship, theater, and even the Internet. His newest book, The Boys, or Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter, a prose elegy for his wife’s three wheelchair-bound brothers, was published in September 2005 by…