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Ange Mlinko

Ange Mlinko is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Florida. Her fifth book of poems is Distant Mandate.
 (July 2020)

IN THE REVIEW

Water Music

Alice Oswald at her house, South Devon, England, 2016

Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea

by Alice Oswald

Falling Awake

by Alice Oswald
That there would be no English literary tradition without Greek and Latin is almost axiomatic. The Earl of Surrey invented blank verse by translating Virgil; Milton trained to be Milton by translating Latin poets, then translating his own verse into Latin; when Auden wanted to adapt Marianne Moore’s syllabics to …

‘A Walk Through Someone Else’

Feel Free

by Nick Laird

O Positive

by Joe Dunthorne
When I ask myself what makes poetry from the UK sometimes especially satisfying—a high-performance machine running on all cylinders—the answer has to do with the greater variety and texture of the vocabulary, the economy of its soundscapes, the material pleasure in the language. But it’s more than that. Pleasure in …

Acts of Extreme Attention

Karen Solie, Toronto, early 2000s

The Caiplie Caves

by Karen Solie
If you happen to go looking for information on Ethernan, the seventh-century hermit who inhabited the Caiplie Caves on Scotland’s Fife coast, you will likely find a few squibs on a Saint Ethernan who died in 875 CE, on the nearby Isle of May, where Vikings rampaged his monastery—now an …

‘Resist and Disobey!’

Lawrence Ferlinghetti; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Little Boy

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems

edited by Nancy J. Peters
Near the end of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s autobiographical novel, Little Boy, the narrator is people-watching at a café in his adopted hometown of San Francisco: “everyone on their portable universes their handheld computers and nobody talking to anyone else.” Why are we here, he wonders, and what are we supposed to …

A View Beyond the Personal

John Koethe; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016

by John Koethe
“Major American poetry is the best philosophy ever written on this continent,” Marilynne Robinson once wrote. I wonder what John Koethe would say about that. Author of The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (1996) and Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning (2005), Koethe was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the …

Holding It Together

Hey, Marfa

by Jeffrey Yang, with paintings and drawings by Rackstraw Downes

Baby, I Don’t Care

by Chelsey Minnis
Is free verse dead? It has been obvious for some time that the unrhymed, unmetered, anecdotal, or monological personal utterance, distinguished by something known as “voice” (as in “finding your voice”) has gone stale; that some esteemed lyric poets, like Terrance Hayes or Natasha Trethewey, have turned back to time-honored …

A Midsummer Night’s Work

Was it you, presenting in the evening bougainvillea as a hummingbird again, you voluptuary, dual febrile wings ashine as a seamstress’s spool, hovering over the brachts with power tools to fix a beam or caulk the cracks? …

Whole Earth Troubadour

W.S. Merwin in the palm forest at the Merwin Conservancy, Haiku, Hawaii, 2011

The Essential W.S. Merwin

edited by Michael Wiegers

Garden Time

by W.S. Merwin
W.S. Merwin is the author of almost fifty volumes of poems and translations as well as eight books of prose fiction and nonfiction. He has maintained his fidelity to this early vision of poetry, bequeathed by Pound and summed up in his famous line from The Spirit of Romance: “All ages are contemporaneous.” Translation has freed Merwin to refuse stultifying academic appointments. It has facilitated his travels—despite the French farmhouse, he led a fairly peripatetic life before settling in Hawaii in the late 1970s. But most of all, translation has provided him with “the literary world. Another plane of existence.” In other words, a grand company continually needing rescue from the abyss, an ennobling endeavor, a way to communicate across time and space.