Volume 43, Number 19 · November 28, 1996
The Supreme Fiction
By Denis Donoghue
Soul Says: On Recent Poetry
by Helen Vendler
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 266 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham
by Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 100 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition
by Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 139 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Helen Vendler is justly admired as the author of critical studies of George Herbert, Keats, W.B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Her current project is a study of Shakespeare's sonnets. She is also the most influential reviewer of contemporary poetry in English: her reviews of new books of poetry appear frequently and forcefully in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, parnassus, and other journals. Soul Says—the title is taken from a poem by Jorie Graham—is a collection of her recent reviews: the poets she considers include Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Dave Smith, Robinson Jeffers, James Schuyler, Frank Bidart, Albert Goldbarth, Amy Clampitt, Donald Davie, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, John Ashbery, Henri Cole, Rita Dove, August Kleinzahler, Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, and Lucie Brock-Broido. Occasions to write about these poets arose, I imagine, from happy chances, invitations from editors.
Review, 5388 words
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