THE PUBLIC GARDENS is noted in
(Very nice company, including
Mary Ruefle, Jack Gilbert, Lyn Hejinian, Nourbese Philip.)
"Other books worth shelf space: Linda Norton’s cross-genre The Public Gardens: Poems and History, full of sharp and anxious writing, delivers on its title while dismantling the notion of autobiography. “All is possible / Sleep’s reason is neutral,” Lyn Hejinian writes in The Book of a Thousand Eyes, at once a serial poem, a collage of disparate thoughts, and a dream diary. The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry by Raymond Barfield snapshots the thorny relationship between art and inquiry, as does Christian existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev’s less recent (1916) and, it seems, vanished volume The Meaning of the Creative Act. M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! tests the respective allegiances of history and philosophy to morality."
Thank you to
ANDREW DAVID KING for this mention, and for the interview he did with me for
Kenyon Review last spring. You can access that
interview here.
Click here for
The Kenyon Review's complete list of recommended reading, December 2012.
