Current Issue

Poetry and the Critical Eye                                      SPRING 2013

Our spring issue of 2013 focuses on the art of verse and its criticism. Aiken Taylor Award winner Debora Greger and SR veteran David Mason headline a stellar lineup of poets including Cally Conan-Davies, Pamela Gross, and Lawrence Kessenich, joined by fiction by T. Alan Broughton. Pamela Macfie recalls her experience at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Sam Pickering extols the virtues of reading “Poetry at the Breakfast Table,” and Mel Livatino explores his real-life connection with Philip Larkin’s “Church Going.” David Heddendorf writes on Randall Jarrell and newcomer Adrian Frazier writes about “Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats’s Dream, and the Double Life of Maud Gonne.” New books by poets Joseph Salemi, Kevin Hart, and Peter Makuck are reviewed; Marc Hudson compares recent translations of Beowulf, and Warren Leamon shares his hard-hitting criticism of “Some Contemporary Poets.”

The water talks like an old woman known

for knowing names of every man she touched.

—David Mason, “Necessity”

Dive into some samples of the issue with Sam Pickering's "Poetry at the Breakfast Table," Samuel Hynes's "Keeley Rules," and Cally Conan-Davies' "Ulysses Blue."

The implausibility of Yeats’s patent claim partly involves the dream itself. Who dreams of 1798, really? He ought to be dreaming—if he is like other men—of sex, women, victories, and strokes of luck.

—Adrian Frazer, “Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Yeats’s Dream, and the Double Life of Maud Gonne”