Joshua Weiner : part two

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I've been reading Tom Pickard, early work up through his latest, Fiends Fell Journal, published last year by Flood Editions, beautifully edited and produced by Devin Johnston at Flood, he does such great work, and he has a keen feeling for English poetry that deserves a better audience in the U.S.--the reissue of Roy Fisher's A Furnace, edited by Peter Robinson, is a good example of a book that really needed a champion, and Devin stepped in, impeccably.  I've also been taken by the recent W.S. Graham books--Michael Hofmann's edition for NYRB, and the new Faber selected.  It was an anniversary year last year for Graham, and I'm eager to see the new issue of Chicago Review, with its Graham feature, which should hit stands presently.  Hofmann's own feeling for Graham, the choices he's made, has helped me really hear what's wonderful in that work.  I've also been reading through Donna Stonecipher's books, one by one, a remarkably consistent body of work--six books out, it's clear she knew what she was about from the very beginning.  The most recent books of hers--The Cosmopolitan, Model City, Transaction Histories, and the chapbook from Catenary Press, Ten Ruins--all devoted to the prose poem, are certainly some of the most formally rigorously defined in that genre, which from the outset defies definition.  I've also recently enjoyed new first books by Lindsay Bernal, Liz Countryman, and Joshua Mensch, all quite different from each other, and books that I admire and find auspicious.  Otherwise, I've been immersed in the German translations and essays of Michael Hamburger, collected in a recent omnibus from Carcanet--more than any other poet writing in English, Hamburger gave us a comprehensive image of what German poetry accomplished in the 20th century.  Though, as post-script, I'd add that I just got my hands on David Gascoyne's Collected Verse Translations, which I'm working through, with special attention to "Hölderlin's Madness," a cycle of the German Romantic's poems, translated quite freely--I think Gascoyne was working with a French translation from German, which rather triples up the translation layers, quite interestingly--and antecedent to Hamburger's edition, which was really the first complete translation into English.  That's all rather heavy.  The book I just finished and enjoyed immediately rereading and am still rereading is Anthony Madrid's There Was an Old Man with a Springbok, which you can hear is a limerick; in fact the book is over 140 limericks that are as good as anything by Edward Lear, and of a demented genius that is 100% Madrid.  They are light verse in the most serious way, the sensibility a kind of extraordinary verbal champagne spiked with a gabillion bubbles of technical virtuosity.  It's the most dangerous book I've read all year.