In 2001, Ivan R. Dee began publication of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize–winner with the appearance of Donald Petersen’s Early and Late. The New Criterion, which has published poetry since 1984, is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry with a regard for traditional meter and poetic form. The magazine was thus an early leader in that poetic renaissance that has come to be called the New Formalism. For 2002 The New Criterion Poetry Prize was awarded to Adam Kirsch. His first book of poems, The Thousand Wells, is now published. Combining a passionate lyricism with commanding technical skill, Mr. Kirsch offers a beguiling and memorable sequence of poems that are deeply alive to the enchantments of nature and the chastenings of history. This is a remarkable debut by a notable young poet.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
As a frequent reviewer for the New Republic and the New York Times, Adam Kirsch is one of the most visible of young poetry critics, but he also practices what he critiques. His debut collection, The Thousand Wells, won the New Criterion's Poetry Prize, and features 31 rhymed stanzaic lyrics in a diction elevated and hortatory-but not above humor. If Lowell was tamed by Miltown, Kirsch's "Zoloft" imagines "misery/ Will take its place with polio and plague.../ While madness and possession, shame and sin/ Survive, like the humors or astrology,/ To make us smile at errors that have been,/ Or figures to adorn our poetry."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Kirsch's first collection has only one unrhymed poem and no free-metered--or bad--poems in it. Its four parts contain poems of, respectively, the seasons in the city, history and heritage, love, and reflection. Regardless of subject and tone, these are, because of their forms, poems of wit. The eight-line stanzas (an Italian sonnet's sestet plus a rhymed couplet) of "A Love Letter" inhibit plainly saying "I love you" but facilitate an inquisitive and devotional anthem on love worthy of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, who are sometimes scolded for being too witty. Each quatrain of the ballad "Irresponsible Foetus," whose theme is unintended pregnancy, essays a light, rueful dance that in the fourth line trips on hard reality. The long-measure quatrains of "The Chosen People" perfectly balance the poem's conceit that the moon is to the earth as the Jews are to the rest of humanity; the lines' syllabic equivalence holds both sides of the analogy deftly aloft. The other poems afford similar pleasures of matter married to manner. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deft, effortless lyrics intone a subtle gravity,
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This review is from: The Thousand Wells: Poems (New Criterion Series) (Hardcover)
I had to come to Kirsch's defense after reading the first review here. One star? Comments only fit for Jonathan Safran Foer's adventures in nepotism? Nyet. There is a grace to these poems which more than balances their admittedly modest philosophical ambition. To merely watch the forms unfold with their intended ease is truly delightful--a word I've almost forgotten the meaning of since being stuck with the idiot abortion "verse" of most poets from the past, oh, 50 years. Not that Kirsch is any messianic figure, nor that these poems will cause (m)any enthusiastic unruined 16 yr olds to bring much-needed counterrevolution to any Ivy League humanities departments, but they are elegant, aware of cool and counterculture, the entire urban scene and its discontents. What sets these apart is an elegance, an grave anti-gravity, in the sense admired by Nietzsche. They represent evidence of the way out of the present literary darkness we're all maundering in. Congratulations, Mr. Kirsch.
10 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dazzling New Voice,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Thousand Wells: Poems (New Criterion Series) (Hardcover)
I picked this book up in a bookstore (of course I later ordered it from Amazon.com), and was overwhelmed by the virtuosity, maserty of form and technique, and emotional sophistication demonstrated by this young poet. The language is so dazzling, the moods so evocative, the point of view so unpredictable (yet always firmly established), I was just carried away. I can't recommend him enough. Can this really be his first book? I'm amazed, charmed, hooked. I notice the book has already won the New Criterion poetry prize. More, undoubtedly, to follow. I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone searching, yearning for a powerful new voice in American poetry. I think I found him.
12 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Adam Kirsch, Please, If You Are Out There, Stop Writing,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Thousand Wells: Poems (New Criterion Series) (Hardcover)
It is impossible to stress enough the awfulness of this book. Kirsch's book reports disguised as reviews are bad enough, but these totally unidiomatic, humorless, intellectually miniscule poems are worse. He's an absurdity: he writes like a Prime Minister or owner of a fleet of Whalers. Somone stop him!
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