Volume 36, Number 13 · August 17, 1989
Four Prized Poets
By Helen Vendler
Blackbird Bye Bye
by April Bernard
Random House, 66 pp., $16.95
The Night Parade
by Edward Hirsch
Knopf, 84 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Acrimony
by Michael Hofmann
Faber and Faber, 79 pp., $5.95 (paper)
The Daylight Moon and Other Poems
by Les A. Murray
Persea Books, 111 pp., $9.95 (paper)
These books are by poets that arrive recommended in various ways. April Bernard's book won the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award for 1988; Edward Hirsch's last book received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and he has had grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation; Michael Hofmann's' Acrimony was the 1986 Poetry Book Society's Choice in Britain and won the 1987 Geoffrey Faber prize; and Les Murray is widely praised as the best living Australian poet. Something in each of them has attracted notice beyond what most poets achieve; and if I feel some disappointment turning the pages—'Not what I want,' I think, 'Not enough,' I think, 'Why can't he/she…?'—I also will remember some poems from each of these books.
Review, 5411 words
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