It’s National Poetry month in April, so Independent book reviewer David Starkey has, for the second year, written 30 short reviews — one for every day in April. Here are the first six:
Kimiko Hahn, Brain Fever: Kimiko Hahn is inspired by science — in Brain Fever, particularly by neuroscience — but her poetry is, if not alogical, at least nonlinear: full of puns, erasures, associative bursts of heightened, metaphoric language, and “erratic repetition.” She is accustomed, as she writes in one poem, to “making my opinions known, elliptically.”
Linda Hogan, Dark. Sweet.: “[M]en are just the pulled-back curve of the bow,” Linda Hogan writes in a 400-page collection celebrating women, spirituality, justice, and peace. If the poems are at times predictable — juxtaposing the good of the natural world with the baser instincts of modern man — they are nevertheless consistent in their sincerity.