Anne Carson, Short Talks: Brick Books has reprinted an early work by Canada’s most famous (and famously enigmatic) poet. As Margaret Christakos puts it in her insightful introduction, Anne Carson’s Short Talks “presents 45 small taut rectangles of poetic address that each frame a seismic smithering of the human condition.” Beautiful, sometimes baffling, brilliant.
Kathleen Jamie, The Overhaul: Ospreys and sheep shearers, abandoned lighthouses and rocky coasts, “gale-force easters” and the half-wilderness of ��some auld fairmer’s / shelter belt” inhabit the world of Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie. The Overhaul is a short book but better for its brevity — each image carefully chosen, each phrase redolent of sea air.
David Roderick, The Americans: It’s extraordinarily difficult to juggle the often competing demands of beauty and the avant-garde, but David Roderick somehow manages the trick, especially in a series of searing, sardonic poems titled “Dear Suburb,” where “The dead return / as lampposts, gas guzzlers, // gnats frenzied / in a laptop’s moonish glow.”