Today's (1/28/2012) New Book Releases on Literature & Fiction

In his nineties Philip Gross's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia. Deeply thought as well as deeply felt, these poems reach into that gulf to find him - through recovery of histories both spoken and unspoken as well as an excavation of the spoken word itself. Readers who admired Philip Gross's subtlety and range in his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection The Water Table will find those qualities brought to a new human urgency in the compelling sequences of Deep Field.

If one thing characterizes the active imagination Donahue brings to bear on his poem, it's his desire that the visionary reality he has entered not be merely some dream, but a place of absolute reality. His skill at conveying this feeling seems unmatched by any other living American poet, such that parts of his poem exhibit a simultaneous lightness of touch and gravitational pull, where surrealistic follies vie with imaginal intensities. --Peter O'Leary

Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) was born to French parents in Montevideo, orphaned within a year of his birth, and grew up in Uruguay and France. He spent the Second World War exiled in Uruguay, afflicted by ill health and financial ruin. His poems are dreamlike, often gently fantastical, imbued with an appealing surface clarity. His work stands apart from much 20th-century French poetry, and he has been characterised as a writer of Basque descent who wrote in French but in the Spanish tradition, with a strong affinity for the open spaces of his South American childhood and nostalgia for a cosmic brotherhood of men. In many respects he seems our contemporary, a writer of highly personal poems as well as poems concerned with war and the environment.

Gig Ryan's edgy, excoriating poetry takes the pulse of urban Australia, but her territory is as much the human rat-race and the hell of contemporary life as the particular lives she seizes upon with icy, ironic precision. Her range of reference brings together heroes, heroines and put-upon mortals of both ancient and modern times: slaves and moneygrabbers, pretenders and worshippers of ephemera and effluvia, for whom 'I continue my existence as a negative role-model / bathing in the blood of others / sitting in a cone of noise.'

"A Story I Am In" is not just James Berry's life in poetry but a book of all the lives he has witnessed or been part of - a story of life itself. He came to Britain in 1948, in the first postwar wave of Jamaican emigration, later becoming one of the first black writers in Britain to achieve wider recognition. Poetry mattered to Berry from an early age, exposed to two main languages: the standard English of Bible and prayerbook heard every Sunday at church, with all its rhythms and sounding patterns; and the tunes of everyday Jamaican language, with its sayings and proverbs, its special dialect words with their African connections, its expression of a roots culture. These experiences gave him that strong and particular Caribbean awareness of language which has nourished his poetry over many years. This major retrospective of his work covers five collections published over four decades, plus a selection from four books of poetry for children. Much of his poetry celebrates the divided world of a lifelong outsider. Growing up in Jamaica, Berry felt as much disturbed by his African background as by the European slave-trade and its aftermath. His poetry shows how 'root agonies' made him view Africa as a thoughtless and neglectful mother, how his years in Britain - most of his adult life - left him worried by past, present and future. Now in his mid-80s, he has sought in his later work to give voice to all the people who came on the first ships from the Caribbean, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages from Africa to the slave plantations.