By Linda Elisabeth Beattie, Special to The Courier-Journal, February 28, 2009

Seed Across Snow, a lush collection of intelligent, elegant and very wise verse, is Louisvillian Kathleen Driskell's stunning second book. Her first book, Laughing Sickness, sealed the associate program director of Spalding University's brief-residency

Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program's reputation as a remarkable poet. Seed Across Snow is more striking still.

Readers plunge into Driskell's poetry with

assurance because her voice is so accessible, her

subjects so familiar. "Forgive" concerns a woman

whose focus shifts as her son gets his hair cut.

She writes, "Short, really short, I said, but I

was in fact, not thinking/ of him, was

looking out the wide windows, the traffic

passing."

When the mother finally turns to her son she

gasps "at the swath shorn, the wide path of stubble across/ the back of his head. His scalp

was like a plucked/ ridiculous bird, a prisoner-of-war, vulnerable/ His crime? To have a

mother whose head could be turned/ from him so easily."

Driskell's stanzas reflect the rectitude of such prosaic scenes. She writes, "And in that broad mirror, that

magnifying glass, his eyes/ trapped mine — were the unforgiving and blistering sun,/ and I

began to feel the smoke rise inside me,/ the smoldering ruin that my carelessness cost,/ and

his furious attempt to turn this poem to cinders."

The poet's voice is a pitch-perfect blend of humor and angst, reason and resolve. Instead of preaching to her

readers, she invites them to re-examine the evidence of experience. Her revelations are as precise as they are profound.

Driskell's powerful diction also transcends grief with tensile grace. In "Overture" she links memories of

classmates' fatalities with the near death of a neighbor, the demise of a beloved dog and a great-grandfather's

suicide. It's a tightly written poem with orchestral range; its cadence is the urgent surge of life chased and chastened by mortality.

Late in the poem the narrator listens as her daughter sleepwalks. "She moved like a child who knew things, and I knew / I had walked that same way and so I watched her and wondered / who had told her these things and when, when / had I not been around? When? When I was her age, I lay / on the flowered davenport at my grandmother's home / and she told me things no child should know: women were beaten so that their faces / held the purple blooms of late roses, men drank themselves / to tears, so that they were not men to the women / who lived with them, aunties drank lye then, and it was all about shame, as it always is, but also about living story. / I recall that now and I recall everything for what do we have / but the past to parent us?"

Such achingly beautiful lines about in Seed Across Snow. It's a lovely book to read this late winter as our region rotates toward the light and we reappraise the shape of our world.

Bradfield's poems guide us alertly into this treacherous territory pocked with political pitfalls and theoretical quagmires. One hardly notices the perils that abound because Bradfield is such a deft naturalist, with a keen eye.

from Jon Christiensen's review in the San Francisco Chronicle June 8, 2008

Read the entire review.

“

Bradfield depicts scenes commonplace and extraordinary alike, and her poetry touches on a variety of topics, yet despite this, there is nonetheless a common concern that unites many of this collection's poems: the human inclination to overlook our environment.

Read the entire review

“

This fascination with naming necessarily leads to one of the book's recurring thematic questions: what do we really mean when we say nature and natural?…As the inaugural publication of Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press devoted to the work of lesbian writers, Interpretive Work is an auspicious debut for both the imprint and its author, a testament to poetry's marvelous capacity to decontextualize human life into moments of resounding insight.

read the review

“

…the importance of the poems lies in their extraordinary awareness of so many different ways to engage the world. As the crises of the twenty-first century intensify, it is this kind of careful attention to environment, humans, culture and the interconnections between the three that will describe what it means to be human.

read the review

“

Bradfield's poems are stocked full of unfamiliar words, statistically-improbable phrases, sonorous lines, shapely stanzas, endearing arguments and compelling personalities. Her recurring subjects wear much better than her recurring tropes. I am partial to her senses of incongruity, outlaw difference, and sheer perverse terror and delight in bad language… She has a touch of that sublime regret we've required, since forever… we rely on critics to recommend writers … I see something in this book. I hope Bradfield continues to develop and change. Nature certainly doesn't seem to be slowing down, and we're going to need poets like Bradfield to keep reminding us of that, and a lot else besides.

Read the review

“

Review by Nina MacLaughlin in The Boston Phoenix, June 21, 2008

In Safe Suicide, an assemblage of revealing, interrelated essays, DeWitt Henry ” Emerson professor, writer, and founding editor and longtime guiding creative force behind literary magazine Ploughshares offers up to us his world, honest and intimate. The essays concern his family life growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs (sexually charged; alcoholic father looming); his marriage and struggles over his own possible parenthood (questions of sacrifice as well as his readiness, willingness, and even ability to be a father); the birth, adoption, and raising of his two children; the genesis and development of Ploughshares and the literary scene in Boston from the seventies onward; plus, thwarted ambition, marathon training, fatherhood, friendship, and the lifelong challenge of how and where to focus and divide your passions. Taken together, the essays become an extended and elegant meditation on manhood.

Read more.

“

Review by Chuck Leddy in The Boston Globe, April 21, 2008

A bountiful harvest of thoughts on life's journey

By Chuck Leddy

April 21, 2008

Safe Suicide: Narratives,

Essays, and Meditations

By DeWitt Henry

Red Hen Press, 200 pp., $23

more stories like thisIn this interconnected collection of autobiographical essays, we're brought into the fascinating life of a Boston-area novelist and editor struggling to build a viable writing career, sustain an important literary journal, and become a loving husband, father, and friend. Since these struggles are all accompanied by drama and pain (but also unexpected pleasures), DeWitt Henry's vivid collection reads like an absorbing coming-of-age memoir.

Henry is the founding editor of "Ploughshares," a Boston-based literary journal that has published literary luminaries such as Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Richard Yates. For Henry, "Ploughshares" was a labor of love (meaning, it almost ruined him financially). Henry describes the seat-of-the-pants nature of those early days putting out the journal: "Connie and I would stuff copies into mailing bags, staple the bags, hand address, and put stamps on perhaps 1,000 copies to subscribers . . . Our couch, dining table, chairs, every available surface would be covered with stacks of copies."

Read more.

“

Review by John Domini in GENTLY READ LITERATURE, December 2008

It's called creative non-fiction, and these days there's just no stopping it. More and more commercial publishing depends on the memoir, ostensibly non-fiction and most, at least, remain reasonably true to the facts. Meanwhile, at universities all over the country a fledgling writer can earn multiple degrees in the genre, though it seems just recently hatched. Truman Capote could claim to have invented the approach in 1965 when he published his "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood. Another originator could be Tom Wolfe with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968 or when Norman Mailer bulled onto the scene with The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (both also '68). All fine work, no denying, and all apply the intimacy, subtlety, and significant shape of a made-up story to a real one. They take the moil of experience and recompose it with a beginning, middle, and end; they excavate character, establish metaphors, and identify watersheds.

Read more.

“

Safe Suicide reviewed by Rand Richards Cooper in AMHERST MAGAZINE, fall 2008

In Safe Suicide, the Boston-based novelist, professor and editor DeWitt Henry has collected his autobiographical essays first published in literary journals such as The Iowa Review and The Harvard Review. With topics ranging from "Innocents Abroad" to "Gym Jerks," this loosely knit memoir offers vignettes and reflections interspersed among longer narratives, puzzle pieces that gradually reveal the shape of a writer and teacher's life.

Read more.

“

Review in CONTRARY MAGAZINE

“

"Green is an intensely formal poet–not in tone, but in construction. Look at that table of contents again: five groups of ten. A desire for symmetry, some revelatory order. He can write a perfect sonnet, works well within couplets, finds rhyme a help rather than a hindrance, and finds non-standard forms. None of these is more present than the form he uses for 'American Fractal' and a handful of other poems: a fully justified, mostly unpunctuated line that uses gaps for pauses and line breaks. […] Here the fractal is revealed in the constant breaking within a highly rigid visual. These poems have something powerful driving them…"

–Andrew Kozma, from "Fractal as Form," LineOnLine, 30.2. Click here to read the full review.

“

Dan Wickett, on the widely-read blog for his Emerging Writers Network, lists Earthquake I.D. as one of the best books of 2007, and awards it 4 stars.

"A great, jam-packed novel about, well, here's where it gets tough, which to me is always a good sign. A family travels to Italy, mome wants to leave dad, the middle son is seen as a Christ figure by the locals, and much, much more is going on. All handled skillfully, both in terms of character development, and plot."

See full review.

“

Praise for Earthquake I.D. from Thomas Burke, in THE LITERARY REVIEW (50/3, Spring 2007):

"an exploration of contrasts: opulence and destitution; the loved, the loving, and the dissatisfied; intractable guilt, piety and sin; characters' faith in progress while deeply cemented in reality; all interspersed between studies of our varied, yet universal human contradictions. Earthquake I.D. is what results when the sheltered and complacent are confronted with real urgency of situation."

"There's nothing tired about Domini's well-orchestrated narrative… the complex development of Barbara's character, the slow reveal of family/company secrets, and concern for the Lulucita children make for justly engaging storylines. And while Earthquake I.D. isn't necessarily a novel about place… one of the book's finest attributes is the Naples landscape: southern Italy as described by John Domini…. It's a pleasure to visit these elegant representations of the visual and tactile."

"Earthquake I.D. is a dramatic narrative of cosmopolitan ideas & social commentary as it should be… a very well told story."

Read more.

“

"Everything I write requires this: Alphabet." A child sees letters first, "shape distinguishing itself from its background," but soon we lose the innocence of that first encounter to ideas of sound, sequence, and sense, some fixed order separating right from wrong. In this debut, White, a Dine' (Navajo), never gives up the innocence of the icons: the stars he saw in his rattled head took the shape of the Alphabet, and "years later, my fascination for letters resulted in poems." White tries to remain true to the core, the bones, of language. His hope is to explore an indigenous thought that has been corrupted by the cultural, intellectual, and social threat that English has imposed. He thus experiments with line, space, and syntax: "A man in a black suit with a zero/ for a head follows me. He carries a gun/ shaped like language; wants me written/ and dead on the page." Such original, and even daring, ideas are clearly not intended for every reader and not meant for every collection, but for those who are up to the challenge, White's poetry will provide a curious twist.

–Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia