Anthologies of Place

Ice fishing, Robert Frost and the Boston Red Sox's reliable losing streaks are among the subjects taken up in Contemporary Poetry of New England, edited by poet and former Breadloaf Writers' Conference director Robert Pack (Fathering the Map) and poet and novelist Jay Parini (House of Days). The anthology features work from Mark Doty, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin and many other poets, including some—Rosellen Brown, Julia Alvarez—probably more familiar to readers for their fiction. Pastoral landscapes abound, Emerson and Dickinson are regularly apostrophized and there are many, many snowstorms. (Middlebury/UPNE, $45 224p ISBN 0-87451-965-9; $19.95 paper -966-7; May 31)

"Every now and then a word/ crosses the border... marrying another/ it is received hospitably,/ declining or serving as a shield:/ little by little words turn mestiza... The dark hued family of words/ produces a blond daughter." These lines from Antonio Deltoro's "Cartography" are among the offerings of Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poetry. Edited by poet and translator Mónica de la Torre (coauthor of Appendices, Illustrations, & Notes) and Copper Canyon Press managing editor Michael Wiegers, this huge bilingual volume introduces readers to both lyric and narrative Mexican poets of varying backgrounds—including indigenous poets writing in Zapotec and Mazatec—all born after 1950. (Copper Canyon, $20 paper 704p ISBN 1-55659-159-4; June)

Edward Hirsch, Thomas Lux, Louise Glück and Stephen Dobyns are some of the bards showcased in Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets. The volume gathers work by poets who have taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program, including editors Ellen Bryant Voigt (Kyrie) and Heather McHugh (The Father of the Predicaments). A range of styles is reflected, from Carl Phillips's neoclassical lyrics to Campbell McGrath's "Because This Is Florida": "Because this is Florida, we can be what we choose to be,/ say, Dixie-fried Cubano rednecks. It's that kind of place./ When the heavy metal band plays 'Rocky Top, Tennessee'...." (Univ. of Georgia, $50 384p ISBN 0-8203-2406-X; $24.95 paper -2416; Aug.)

...and Gender

Internationally acclaimed poets like Wislawa Szymborska, Lucille Clifton, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Fadwa Tuqan protest violence and war in A Chorus for Peace: A Global Anthology of Poetry by Women. Edited by Brigham Young University English professor Marilyn Arnold, BYU psychology professor Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill and Western Michigan University creative writing teacher Kristen Tracy, the book is divided into sections like "Women Surviving War," "Domestic Battlefields" and "Reaching and Rebuilding." "I was to be shot at dawn," writes Irina Ratushinskaya in "I Had a Strange Dream," "And then one of my classmates appeared,/ My classmate said: 'Good evening/ How unlucky you've been. I'm very sorry./ I mean, being shot—it's so inhumane./ I've always believed in soft measures.' " (Univ. of Iowa, $44.95 242p ISBN 0-87745-811-1; $19.95 paper -812-X; June 1)

New poetry by Lucie Brock-Broido, Harryette Mullen, Ann Lauterbach, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Brenda Hillman, Jorie Graham and others is featured in American Women Poets of the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, a collection that explores how—or whether—gender influences contemporary poetry by women. The volume, edited by poets Claudia Rankine (Plot) and Juliana Spahr (Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You), includes a "poetic statement" by each of the 10 featured poets, in which she discusses aesthetics and identity, as well as a critical essay on each poet's work and a bibliography. (Wesleyan, $65 426p ISBN 0-8195-6546-6; $24.95 paper -6547-4; May)

May Collections

A bold editor at literary presses Cape Editions and Cape Goliard, publishers of Charles Olson, J.H. Prynne and Ted Berrigan, among others, Nathaniel Tarn here provides samples from 19 of his 25 collections in Selected Poems 1950—2000. The book begins with 1964's "Old Savage/Young City," a jazzy meeting of myth and modernity borrowing from the great voices of the first half of the 20th century, where the speaker envisions the dead sailing to the underworld on ocean liners, "helpless without their desks/ and phones and sexy secretaries." (Wesleyan Univ., $45 346p ISBN 0-8195-6541-5; $19.95 paper -6542-3)

In the five sequences of San Francisco poet Norma Cole's fourth collection, "the sleep of reason/ considers progression/ gives you a sample" with "all the creatures/ tumbling out onto the tabletop of definition." Spinoza in Her Youth moves from "The Vulgar Tongue" through to "Desire & Its Double" and "Conjunctions," mixing verse and prose to trace varying forms of thought. Embedded prose poems such as "Artificial Memory" and much of the 31-page title sequence achieve a rich abstraction that extrapolates the self's refractions: "the idealization of the face/ in the year -1/ nothing but a shadow/ she so became her name/ so first, this faith, it was/ a social tool." (Omnidawn [www.omnidawn.com], $12.95 paper 128p ISBN 1-890650-09-9)

Following a trajectory from apocalypse to redemption, Story Line press founder Robert McDowell's third collection invites readers to go "into the writing where anything/ Can happen." On Foot, in Flames is filled with "a sweet sighing/ From the souls of trees" and "recollections of the days when you/ Surprised yourself with competence, even grace." McDowell appeals to grace in part as a response to violence, as in his depiction of working in a slaughterhouse—"Stitched into gloves and apron,/ Lye-spattered, soaked with grease,/ I feed my machine 1,200 hides a day./ Sometimes I think this was the neck, this the tail"—or in three blank-verse monologues that witness, among other things, violence against women. (Univ. of Pittsburgh, $13 paper 96p ISBN 0-8229-5783-3)

With highly compressed reference to figures as various as Hatshepsut and Harry Truman, Caroline Knox's A Beaker: New and Selected Poems dazzles with encyclopedic smarts and rhetorical rhinestones, showcasing the dense, edgy wordplay that is Knox's forte. Whimsical verse-prose hybrids offset the narratives with quirky quatrains spoken (at one point) by dogs, or with fantastical dialogues between, say, an eminent American man of letters and the discoverer of the North Pole: " ADMIRAL PEARY : Welcome aboard, sir./ JOHN ASHBERY : Thank you, but I will not come aboard. I am quite happy here." Longtime fans will also appreciate the selections from Knox's three previous collections, two of which were published by the University of Georgia. (Verse, $14 paper 132p ISBN 0-9703672-7-9)

Whiting fellow Albert Mobilio's sophomore effort, Me with Animal Towering, heads off in several directions from his groundbreaking 1996 debut, The Geographics, the unacknowledged original from which so much fin de siècle wise-guy prose-poetry-for-prose-poetry's sake has been counterfeited. He still times perfectly his alternations between tough and schlumpy personae, gifted at finding sensuous details in the bins of dinged language out in front of literature's seedier bazaars: "Not only did I have marijuana, I told her, but I had some cocaine. She nearly trilled, her voice sounding like the bright clang of divine scales tipping in my favor." (Black Square Editions/Hammer Books [Four Walls Eight Windows, dist.], $18 112p ISBN 0-9712485-1-6)

Correction: In the April 29 review of Karen Volkman's Spar, the poet was incorrectly identified as having attended the University of Iowa's MFA program. Volkman is a graduate of Syracuse University's program.