Tags
book review, books, covid, creative writing, mental health, poem, Poetry, social distancing, writers
The book review of Maggie Smith’s new collection Goldenrod talks about finding universal truths in times of distress. Poetry can free the spirit of the weight of the world and “for more than a year now, the distress of social distancing, lockdown, and a rapidly mutating virus has overshadowed our public lives. In her new collection Goldenrod, Pushcart-Prize winning poet MaggieSmith responds to this destabilization by turning inward and asking — is the universal truth what we think it is?”
A wonderful read.
Marlo Starr writes and teaches in Baltimore. She holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and a PhD in English from Emory University. Her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in BOAAT, The Threepenny Review, Berfrois, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere.
Peter Filkins is the author of four previous collections of poetry – What She Knew (Orchises 1998), After Homer (Braziller 2002), Augustine’s Vision (New American Press 2010), and The View We’re Granted (Johns Hopkins 2012), for which he received the 2013 Sheila Motton Award for a best book of poetry from the New England Poetry Club. He has also translated the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken (Zephyr 2006) and three novels by H.G. Adler – Panorama, The Journey, and The Wall, published by Random House. His biography, H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. His work has received the Stover Award in Poetry from Southwest Review, a Finalist Award in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, an NEH Fellowship, a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Millay Colony, the James Merrill House, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The American Scholar, The New Republic, Poetry, The Yale Review, The New Criterion, Partisan Review, The Paris Review, The N.Y. Times Book Review, and numerous other publications. He serves as the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and also teaches translation at Bard’s main campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.