Steve Venright : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I haven’t been reading much poetry of late, though a couple of fairly recent favourites would be Stuart Ross’s poetic novel Pockets (ECW), and the selected writings of Paul Dutton (Sonosyntactics) and Alice Burdick (Deportment), both from WLU Press. I have, however, been reading lots of books about poetry and poets. I’ve now read almost everything by Richard Holmes, including his massive and exceptional bios of Shelley and Coleridge, and his trilogy of “reflections of a Romantic biographer” which include, as in the most recent instalment This Long Pursuit, revelatory mini-bios of poets who are often better known their other vocations, such as Margaret Cavendish and Zélide (Isabelle de Charriere). Another superb poet-bio I read recently is the one on Keats by Robert Gittings. Oh, and I did just read most of John Ashbery’s Hotel Lautréamont—picked it up in Cambridge at Grolier Books which, like the poet, was born in 1927. Not bad, that guy.