Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008
'Everything Is a Mystery'
By Charles Simic
How to Be Perfect
by Ron Padgett
Coffee House Press, 114 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2006
by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Norton, 238 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Here are two poets who've been writing extraordinary poems and who deserve to be better known. Born just a year apart, their work is, however, as different as night and day. Or so it would at first appear. Critics say of Ellen Voigt that she has a 'naturalist's devotion to the physical world' and of Ron Padgett that he is a kind of Pop artist with a passion for comic strips, movies, and other aspects of popular culture. Put this way, the two aesthetics not only sound irreconcilable, they also convey the impression that a poem about a squirrel in a tree will be more authentic than one about a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
Review, 4016 words
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