Reviews of Sphereans' Books
 

Far East of Fargo

Very Far North has filled hours with Timothy Murphy's unique ironic but spiritual sensibility. It is rare to see a poet use so few words to present such lushness of thought. He is a master of the art, as many phrases from his short lines will indicate; e.g., from “The Pallbearers”: "to bury/ love in the loam we've sowed." We don’t normally think of burials as burying love, but this contains truths about the authentic way the emotions respond at the moment of burial.

There is no more poignant and stunning quatrain here than "Blow Winds and Crack your Cheeks." "Horses for my Father" bespeaks Murphy’s lust for words and wind-blown vision. The love he bears living creatures allegedly of a lower order than humanity is a far-reaching lesson in his work; in the tributes to his father is another.

Look for originality, playfulness with words and a sly sense of magic: it would be difficult to tell the effects that fall upon a reader from this work. The floods and droughts are bleak, it is true; but not these poems.

Among the best of Murphy's poems in this collection are "Pa Sapa," "Headwater," "Elsewhere," "Landfall," "Casa Abandonada," "Hunting Time," "Vulture Acres," "Transformation," "Flight Across the Moor," and "Timing." “Flight across the Moor” is a study in horror, frightful but insightful. In “Hunting Time,” the insight in the last four lines brings interesting reflections about depression and alienation as a preparation for death.

The fact that he ends the volume with a series of poems about Tibetan Buddhists is another unique aspect of Murphy's consciousness: who else could combine themes of hunting, Buddhism, sailing, fauna and flora, farming, patriarchs and matriarchs, prairie wisdom, absurd wordplay and Americana in one slim volume?

Here is the first stanza of "Timing":

Walking a narrow path
where pilgrims go astray,
I regulate my breath
because I cannot pray.

What can be unearthed from this perfectly direct and seemingly simple, even childlike, quatrain is hidden knowledge: that praying is, to Tibetan lay folk who are devoutly religious, essentially a regulation of breath, and one which slowly spirals the consciousness upward.

“Prayer to Milarepa” shows rare insight in "I know no mantra /to correct my karma." Murphy knows that nothing can correct one's karma: it's just there, stretching back and even forward, infinite as air or space (but this is my own interpretation, and subject to change without notice).

“Mentor” transmits the poet’s hero-worship and elicits that, as well, for the reader's own heroes, possibly with regrets at not having sought them out.

Here is "Headwaters":

Up switchbacks to passes
we ride winded horses
through spruces, then grasses
ribboned with watercourses,
the Wind River's sources.

A trail called Highline
meanders through flowers
from treeline to snowline
where War Bonnet glowers
on Cirque of the Towers.

A bald eagle's shadow
plummets from its aerie,
then circles this meadow
whose cold waters carry
some hope to our prairie.

This is akin to a prayer, a prayer for the prairie, and regulates the breath as part of its effect.

This collection is a profound achievement in a paper wrapper. No one can say Murphy didn't take Robert Penn Warren's advice to him at Yale. The roots he’s grown strike far and deep. Very Far North is nothing if not an education in how to grow the roots we all need to nourish ourselves and eventually, with luck, to flourish.

Terese Coe (rewrite version)




[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited March 11, 2004).]

(This is how the Krisak review appears in The Alsop Review, as of August 12, 2003)

Even As We Speak By Len Krisak
The University of Evansville Press
ISBN 0-930982-53-3

"It¹s 1946. Do you know where your wives / have been?"

So opens Len Krisak¹s poem, "On The Blue Dahlia." And doesn¹t that witty line break say something about jealousy? Could there be a better place to pause in that sentence; isn¹t it almost an absurdly early catastasis, or the foreshadowing of catastasis?

And the stereotypical plots of our movies rush in, in iambic pentameter, with a kaleidoscopic view. "A lot of edgy talk before that cesspool brew / comes clean," says Krisak. But in his case, the edgy talk is all wit.

The send-ups of his old teachers are alone worth the purchase price. "Mr. Friel" ends, "Like notes God passed, but none could figure out." It¹s a real-life game of Go to the Head of the Class crossed with Chutes and Ladders, as it was played for keeps. Another teacher was "as crimped and banged as Mamie." Another sonnet, about a fellow student ("fellow" being a euphemism), opens, "He said he came from Mars." And Krisak proves it. He proves said student came from Mars. (You will smile the smile of recognition.)

Where love is concerned, Krisak is no laggard. But it takes the form, in one poem, of fond admiration for the "chain gang's toddler-crooks" "in spaced-out, crooked file": in other words, "Day-Schoolers on a Walk." Bemused, and bemusing. I haven¹t been this charmed to revisit my school days since the last time I taught six-year-olds. I¹m even more charmed the volume got what it deserved: the Richard Wilbur Award for 2000.

With understanding, comes wit. At least in this poet¹s case. See how his "A Version of Akhmatova" wryly plumbs the depths of another poet¹s mind, a woman¹s mind. There are also translations of Horace, Johnson (from the Latin) and Asclepiades "at once both guileless and unbending," as the poet says, with opposite meaning, in one Horace translation.

"Rumination" is one of the shortest poems in this collection, and as focused and focusing as a meditation:

They say the Sufis say that God's like fire;
That first you hear the roar, then see the flame,
And at the last, get burned.
But all I've ever learned
From whirling like a dervish with Desire
Is that her name and his are not the same.

These are exhilarating formalist poems, beautifully natural in tone and diction, evoking pale remembrance and high spirits. Even As We Speak places Len Krisak distinctly among the most original and vibrant poets writing today.

Reviewed by Terese Coe




[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited March 11, 2004).]

I suggested some time ago that Spherians write brief reviews of our books for BN.com and Amazon.com. Terese, bless her heart has leaped into the breach. This is not the sort of reticent prose we become accustomed to in the academic quarterlies. It's more fun. If you love or hate a book go to these sites and like Terese, let 'er fly!

Tim, this was a smart idea on your part. There's nothing like writing a review to put your thoughts on a poet in order. I recommend the process to everyone.

Here's a review of Rhina Espaillat's Rehearsing Absence.


After reading this collection of poems, poets everywhere may well envy those who live in Rhina Espaillat’s home town in Massachusetts, because that is where she presides over the monthly workshops of The Powow River Poets. Espaillat’s poems have a way of speaking directly to each person listening: a rare gift.

But she has many gifts: wit; ready intimacy; a natural understanding of the strange, the erratic, and the commonplace; the ability to translate those for others; keen vision into things, people, processes and events; a broad intellectual background upon which palimpsest her poems take form; and the kindness to share all of these with others.

Since the penultimate on that list brings up the subject of the visual arts, it's tempting to think of her husband's sculpture as a complement to her formalist poems, which have a three-dimensionality about them. On the other hand, Espaillat’s poems may comprise more than three dimensions: at times, they approach the five-dimensional.

In "Negations," for example, she hits upon eternity and its simultaneous nonexistence:

as if your days were plates of summer fruit
that you may wash and quarter, core and pare
for guests, until you notice they’ve gone mute,
gone home for good, if they were ever there.

The final line is both ironic and blissful, a combination that comes as naturally to Espaillat as rhyme and elegance.

"On Being Accused of Optimism after Predicting Good Weather" is especially musical, and delights with lines like

“how calibrations country people learn
to make, measure the thinning of the air;”

her "overcast/ with unspent weather" dovetails perfectly with the final line, “forgetting what I meant, or meant to say.”

"Practice" honors the divine gift of making all children one's own, as well as the gift for storytelling. The sly ironies of "Enjoy Your Meal!" (an “insincere” message from her microwave) stand in jovial counterpoint to the blunt truths there.

"Minefields" is a powerhouse. It can bring tears; perhaps the themes of deep friendship, the road, children and war are the mélange that does it. Incredibly, this poet can juxtapose a tragic youthful death with children banging on lids; but the din is part of the WWII remembrance, as well. She writes, "We always make it. Having come this far / we count on destinations."

There is an echo of Samuel Beckett in "Four O'Clock": one line there may hold the whole (“the landscape only seems to stay”). This, again, speaks of the meaningfulness of ephemera. It opens:

The eye, uncertain, almost sees
a luminescence through bare trees
rotating by minute degrees,

and ends:

"that time is an imperfect sum.
Nothing to do but let it come,
whatever light, wherever from.”

This is Rhina Espaillat’s fourth collection of poems. The second, Where Horizons Go, won the TS Eliot Prize in 1998; this book, Rehearsing Absence, won the Richard Wilbur Prize for 2001. John Frederick Nims awarded her the Nemerov Prize for one of her sonnets, and neo-formalist poetry and its adherents have grown much the richer for her lyrical gifts, high craftsmanship, and inspirational beacon.


Terese



[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited June 22, 2003).]

Terese,
Wasn't sure whether you wanted others to latch onto your thread or start new ones. Apologies if it was the latter!
Here's a brief notice I've just posted on Alicia Stallings'
Archaic Smile. (Amazon have my name as Eileen M. Moore - the business version)
That over-used tag 'collector's item' is well deserved by this publication. Readers whose knowledge of Greek myth is rusty or rudimentary need have no fear. A.A. Stallings wears her learning as lightly as she holds the reins of her metrical horses. Humour bubbles up from time to time, as does tenderness, which never slurps into sentimentality.
Themes range from the personal (housework, lost belongings, garden disasters) to the public (the instability of urban civilization, the festering scars of war). Practising poets have much to learn from Stallings' easy switches from myth to modern reality, from colloquial to formal speech registers. Hers is indeed an art which conceals art.
Margaret.
PS. Alicia . Many apologies for putting 'A.A.' for 'A.E.' in the first para. M.

[This message has been edited by Campoem (edited June 26, 2003).]

Posted on amazon.com for "Where Horizons Go":

Anyone who has ever gone to a grandmother or a beloved aunt for comfort or advice will recognize this still, small voice that speaks with such authority and grace.

"Where Horizons Go" is a must-have for any serious contemporary poetry collection. The anatomically and politically correct "Bra" alone is worth the price of the book:

If only the heart could be worn like the breast, divided,
nosing in two directions for news of the wide world,
sniffing here and there for justice, for mercy.

You won't regret this purchase.



------------------
Bill

Margaret

Yes, I was inviting you to post reviews here. Thanks to you and Bill too!

Terese

The reviews of Tim's, Len's, and Rhina's books have been installed at The Alsop Review www.alsopreview.com


Terese

[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited March 11, 2004).]

The review of Very Far North is now up at www.alsopreview.com under "AR Books."

I've taken down the review of Len Krisak's Even As We Speak since I'm revising it, and I'll replace it when it goes up at The Alsop Review, in about two weeks or so.

Terese

Dear Eileen--Margaret?

Thanks SO much for your kind and generous review. I'm especially grateful, since it replaces at the top of the page a rather nasty hatchet job someone posted recently--maybe I annoyed somebody at West Chester?--(no name of course on THAT review). Yours is very cheering and reassuring! Thank you!

Alicia

Alicia,
Was relieved to hear mine got onto the site (assuming you checked there). Will check myself and resubmit if necessary within the next few days. Not having had any previous truck with Amazon reviewing I wondered after posting whether it was OK make up one's own heading (as I did) or whether it had to be the title of the book. Read that hatchet job with some surprise - as your overall rating was five star.
Look forward to reading more of your lively work, Margaret.
(Eileen is my first name - used only for financial or other official purposes only, never socially or for writing, but I tend to give it obediently when organisations demand my first name!)

Thanks so much, Terese and Wild Bill! I'm very grateful for your responses to my poems, and for your comments on Amazon and Alsop Review expressing those.

Unlike Aliki, my five star ratings have been lost on Deed and VFN, largely thanks to some unknown enemy who posted this on the VFN page:

A Bit Too Far North, February 7, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from El Cajon, CA United States
The poet's first book had some moments of interest. I have to agree with the prior reviewer that things got much weaker as the book progressed: insufficient charge, lack of dynamic, failure to come alive off the page, absence of organic vitality or variety after awhile.

With this collection, the same weaknesses manifest themselves. Much more reminiscent of Robert Francis (hard to find anthologized or cited much anymore), and nowhere near the level of mastery, depth, profundity, multi-layered dimensions of Frost.

Uneven in quality. Some genuinely touching and heartfelt moments; some gravity; some wit. Some original music on occasion. But overall lacking the inspiration and sublime artistry of Wilbur, Hecht, Hardy, Betjeman, Larkin and the magnificent short pieces of Yeats, Auden, Robinson, Housman, de la Mare, Masefield, W. Owen, Sassoon, C. Rossetti, Bogan, Wylie, E. Jennings, Vikram Seth, Tim Steele, Dana Gioia, Heaney, Wordsworth, Blake, Geo. Herbert, Glyn Maxwell.

It is hoped the next collection will provide enough maturing, development, progression, freshness, and elements of what Harold Bloom in his just-out book calls 'Groundbreaking Genius' to rate the poetry higher on the rereadable-memorability scale

I encountered this with some amusement, for I rank Robert Francis just behind Robinson and just ahead of Stevens in my personal pantheon of American poets.

An enemy I made at West Chester? I don't think so. Longman had eighteen professors do peer reviews of our Beowulf. 12 of them said they'd drop the Heaney and adopt our version. The others were just unbelievably hostile, one of them even saying "Longman should not be publishing the Sullivan/Murphy version, because they are viciously anti-feminist, and they are reputed to be homosexuals!" How those two assertions can be contained in the same mind, let alone the same sentence, is beyond me!

Ah well, there's an old joke that the fury of academic disputes are inversely proportional to the triviality of what is at stake. And I thank the many gifted readers and reviewers of my work for their charitable appraisals of same.

Tim, my initial reaction to the following quote--

"Longman should not be publishing the Sullivan/Murphy version, because they are viciously anti-feminist, and they are reputed to be homosexuals!"

was exactly like yours. The two halves of the statement seemed to contradict each. Here's the solution, I think. The writer is not repudiating you for being (gasp!) a reputed homosexual, but, rather, wondering how someone reputed to be a homosexual could be "anti-feminist." That is, how could a member of a class that makes up part of the leftist coalition, a gay man, actually criticize another leftist identity group, feminists.

Sound logical? Otherwise, the professor's head would explode from cognitive dissonance.

Tim:
Aside from whether it's possible to be both homosexual (or even reputedly homosexual) AND antifeminist, what does either one or the combination of the two have to do with the quality of the translation? Maybe the person is afraid that if students read it backwards it will have encoded messages promoting the famous homosexual agenda -- or was that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
RPW

I've not a clue what was going on in her head. Actually, I think the liberation of women is the most exciting human development in my lifetime. The leftist critiques of the Wulf were pretty amazing. Our understanding of the poem is 100 years out of date. There is no good and evil, no hero, no monsters. We fail to grasp the essential humanity of Grendel's mother. (Yeah, she only slew Aeschere because she loved her baby.) In any case, the complaints immensely amused the head of literature at Longman, who is such a red-necked barbarian that he hunts with Murphy and Gwynn. When I asked Wilbur what he thought of Logan's infamous review of Mayflies, he smiled and said, "He has his readers. I have mine."

Mr. Wilbur is a wise man indeed.

The brightest and most creative people have always had, will always have, their enemies. Even Socrates had enemies. Even the Buddha had enemies. Even Christ.

Terese

What an immensely silly review of VFN! It consists entirely of comparisons--inept ones--rather than focusing on the work itself, about which it says nothing substantive supported with evidence or examples! Mr. Wilbur's attitude is the wise one, of course: as we say in the Big Apple, fuggedaboudit. It doesn't deserve anything else.

Well OF COURSE there are misogynistic faggots--spend more than three minutes in a gay bar and you will meet some--but it does make you wonder what the same people would say about lesbian separatists.

Thanks, Rhina and Terese. I've been lucky at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com, because the readers who've reviewed me include Suzanne Noguerre, Len Krisak, David Anthony, Terese Coe, Caleb Murdock, and other worthy Spherians. I've posted few reviews there, but here's what I said about Greg Williamson's new book, which all of us must own:

A Scrivener in the Scriptorium, May 27, 2001
Reviewer: Tim Murphy (see more about me) from Fargo, North Dakota
Williamson may well be the most prodigiously gifted young poet to come along since Wilbur, Hecht and Justice appeared around 1950. All these masters have eloquently praised his work; and if we fifty-somethings haven't said much, maybe we're too flumoxed by how damn good he is. Errors in the Script is a substantially better book than The Silent Partner, which was superb. The first third is comprised of big, solid poems which are advances on his earlier triumphs. My two favorites are Origami and Kites at the Washington Monument. The second third is a tour de force, twenty-six Double Exposures. Each poem is three poems, two in heroic couplets, and the third in quatrains. The left and right-hand poems interleave like fingers in hands folded in prayer to form the third, and the third is far greater than the sum of the parts. The same is true of the entire work, an extended meditation on life, on consciousness and perception. The final section of the book is perhaps a little too hip, too flip, for my codgerly taste, though mall-crawlers half my age may prize it above the rest. Anyone seriously interested in the present and future of poetry owes it to her or himself to acquire this terrific collection.

"Longman should not be publishing the Sullivan/Murphy version, because they are viciously anti-feminist, and they are reputed to be homosexuals!"

So were Grendel and his Dam.

Just received Alabaster Flask, and I'm posting this at Amazon and BN.com.


Jennifer Reeser was born in 1968, the year I escaped high school. So at least two good things happened that year. Her first collection of verse, Alabaster Flask, is a knockout. Let the poet speak for herself:

Walking the Ruins

Grandmother made an art of mums and dills,
delphinium and every tender herb,
dreaming of her far-off Virginia hills,
filling the ground with life from curb to curb.

She knelt with mournful eyes the green of jade
each season, singing hymns to praise God’s pardon
and asking Him to touch the plot she’d made --
her latest work of genius in the garden.

Winter could not resist her, nor the glory
one finds by having daisies New Year’s Day,
the famous seed supplier’s cover story,
and strangers at the screen from miles away.

I never lacked for colors in that place.
Her daughter brought me up in monochrome
as elegant and cold as any face
which one time deemed itself a god of Rome,

and Mother gone, with Grandmother yet going
into that garden all will someday go,
it’s only now I see her art was sowing
a seed within me only she could grow.

This is the work of a young woman who chooses her words with great care and with refreshing accuracy. Just run the ums, ers, and ills of that first stanza through your mouth several times. She makes a delectable music, and surprise! she has a store of wisdom to impart to the lucky reader. I’d have to go back to Suzanne Doyle’s “My Grandmother’s Visit” to locate in my capacious memory so ambitious and definitive a poem on this particular familial relationship. Before that I’d reach for “Cottage Street, 1951” Richard Wilbur’s great poem for Edna Ward and Ms. Plath. To achieve this high elegiac tone at thirty-four is quite a feat, but it’s something several thirty-somethings are pulling off: Greg Williamson, Diane Thiel, Alicia Stallings, Catherine Tufariello, to name just four besides Reeser. These thirty-somethings are really something.

The critiques of the Murphy and Sullivan translation of Beowulf were just, for these translators turned Grendel's mother into some kind of monster. In reality, she was a sheltering nurturing figure who would have raised her little boy to be a vegan if there hadn't been so many tasty Geats around. Murphy and Sullivan are bad boys. That is why I prefer the Gilbert and Sullivan version, which begins:

Wet gardenias in the garden--I must beg the Spear-Danes' pardon
To dilate upon Scyld Scefing's greatest deed:
For he fell upon some people and he ransacked hall and steeple
And he carried off the bench where they drank mead.
He was braver than The Hulk and inspired Professor Tolkein
To embark upon his journey for the Ring;
And his people all obeyed him and much tribute they all paid him:
When he died they said that Scyld was "one good king."

Sam,
I got a kick out of your spoof on "Beowulf." The ending made me laugh out loud. Having spent a year in grad school learning to read the poem in the original, I like how you managed to keep the gist of the content while subverting it through the form.

Congratulations to Tim on his idea of having people who know the works well write reviews of poetry books that deserve wider recognition, and post them on Amazon.com. That is really taking the word directly to potential readers, and it may do some good. And good for Terese, for following through on it.

Susan

[This message has been edited by Susan McLean (edited August 07, 2003).]

Every poet who appreciates rhyme should bow humbly before this bit of mastery:
"He was braver than The Hulk and inspired Professor Tolkein"
Having once been pleased with myself for days for rhyming "fifty" and "lift, he," I see there are still mountains to climb!
RPW

This has given me an idea for a new poetic sequence, "The Lost Libretti of W. S. Gilbert." I can imagine all kinds of things: "Satan's Song" from "Paradise Lost, or The Warden of the Garden," etc. Anyone is allowed to contribute ideas.

"How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth" from King Lear (sung to the tune of "Modern Major General").

My review of Len Krisak's book, Even As We Speak, has been published at The Alsop Review:
http://www.alsopreview.com/arbooks/krisak.html

Terese



[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited November 30, 2003).]

I've posted a mini-puff on Sam Gwynn's book, No Word of Farewell, at the amazon site. He's a one-man marathon! If you haven't read it, you are seriously deprived. (For a sample of the poems, see the Musing on Mastery thread on Cynics.)


Giddy with Laughter and Wisdom

Full of wicked humor, slyly wrought pathos, boffo couplets, stunningly relevant sonnets, at least one startling take-stock epic, and giddy cynicism: there's simply no poet in America like Gwynn, and there's no one as funny, period. This is the REAL self-help book! Help yourself cope in this most angst-ridden of seasons: read Gwynn's wisdom and laughter.

(Note the above is already revised from amazon. I'll revise that one when it appears.)

[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited February 01, 2004).]

I'm just curious: how many people have actually BOUGHT a book or a cd or a dvd or video from Amazon based on a review written by a member of what is usually known as the "general public"?

I don't think I have, but the reviews have influenced me into books I was already considering or out of books I was leaning away from.

------------------
Steve Schroeder

Noticed my comments on Sam Gwynn never appeared on amazon, so I've posted there again.

As there has been some negative publicity about Amazon reviews in the press recently (people puffing their own work etc) I guess someone alighting on this thread with little or no acquaintance with other boards might characterise us as a Mutual Admiration Society.Such suspicions will I hope be quickly corrected by a browse through the first dozen threads on TDE and Non-Met.
Here (with apologies for a header that may seem more appropriate to a fizzy drink)is my recent review of Kate Benedict's collection 'Here from away'.
'Energising.
Accessible, versatile, accomplished, compassionate, yes. And in parts very, very funny. Benedict's 'Rienelle' was in itself well worth the purchase price of the volume to this mildly cynical reader:

No meaning, no import, no point, no wit.
I speak of nothing, not even weather.
I've nothing to say and I'm saying it.

Her elegy for the Iranian conjoined twins was vivid and touching without the least hint of false semtimentality.

The vignettes of life in a New York apartment building illuminate corners unfamiliar to those of us who know her city mainly through TV, film or popular fiction.

If, however, I was asked for one word to apply to the collection it would be 'energising'. Which is why I'm about to order a copy as a present for a good friend.'
Margaret.

Amazon published my review of David Anthony's book "Words To Say" but they took their time about it.

Words To Say

by David Gwilym Anthony

I enthusiastically recommend this book.

If anyone wants to understand what it was like to be a decent man who lived in England in the second half of the 20th century, they would find most answers in these poems.

David Anthony is completely comfortable with the sonnet which he uses as naturally as ordinary speech. His sonnets encompass many moods and events.

His villanelle “Plague”, about the foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001, is a heart-breaking evocation of the British countryside during that experience. It must be a poem that will stay in the literature.

His humorous poems are genuinely funny. His serious poems are grave and unforced.

The poem’s content always conceals the consummate craft that contains
it. Because the poems make no strident effort to be noticed they sink deeper into the reader’s mind.

Sensationalised events become human again in this poet’s quiet words. Topics that only a real poet dare approach, such as the murder of little Jamie Bulger by two older children, are seen with wide compassion and social involvement.

There is something almost Shakespearean about his ability to respect each character in his poems. There are no small roles here.
“On the Suicide of a Friend” is intimate and loving.
“Boy Soldier” inspired by a faded photo of his father at the age of fourteen is quietly poignant.

A peopled landscape is always present.

These poems will give great pleasure to those without expert knowledge and even more to those who realise how much skill was needed to produce such simplicity.

Tim, I've reread your books and everyone is right, VFN is the better of the two. But to be far, I read them earlier in my education. My tastes have improved since then.
Jason

It's going to be several months before I immerse myself in the Sullivan and Murphy Beowulf. For the benefit of those who get there sooner, I'm drawing attention to Alan's post on Accomplished Members.
Margaret.

I recently posted a short comment on Charles Martin's delightful translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, mentioning that my class was rapt when I read the section on Phaeton to them. It was several pages long too. That myth in particular speaks to young people so well!

A person going by the handle of “Jerry Quarry” seems to be going on a rampage against books by folks near and dear to the ‘Sphere. Here is the link. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...031364-9009407

All of the reviews were written during a one-week span in March.

His review of Rhina’s book seems to include an anti-Semitic smear for good measure. Does anybody know if there is a way to alert Amazon to this and whether they might care?

epigone

Jerry Quarry is Leo Yankevitch. He smears Rhina and tackles me on grounds which can only be considered homophobic. I hear he's gone after everyone else who pulled an e-book too. I've no idea how to contact Amazon, but if anyone does, you might point out that Leo breathlessly and pseudonymously reviews his own self-published book for Amazon. They need to filter him from the net and be vigilant, just as we have been.

This deserves a bounce. Sphereans reviewing books of poems, not only for Amazon.