Review
"A collection of vigorously mindful poems ... Hoover is a reader's magic reader." -- Salon Magazine, May 4, 1998
"An eloquent and even elegant book which ... addresses itself to pressing concerns of our culture." -- Chicago Review, Volume 45, Number 1, 1999
"His most imagistically impressionistic is what I would call glancingly accurate." -- The Georgia Review, Spring 1998
"Infused with a rooted emotion delivered calmly and frankly, without either apology or pride." -- American Letters & Commentary, Number 10, 1998
American Heaven
As Quietly As Distant
Baseball
The Beautiful Cities
Beauty
Crow's Meats
Death
Desire
Fog And Smoke On Snow
The Garden
The German Version
Great Expectations
Impossible Object
In A Shadow Gate
The Naked Lunch
The Naked Truth
Night Of The Hunter
Pleasure
Providence
Reason's Eye
Red Lilies
Relative Measures Of Absolute Value
The Same Difference
Savage Commentary
South Of X
Stationary Journey
The Steam Parrot
Theory
Voices Off
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
There is a cool precision in these poems, a striking aptness in the marrying of word to word. And in many of them, there is an unexpected tenderness only half-masked by Hoover's allegiance to exploring and mapping language's inherent imperfection. Over the course of the book the individual poems--in which invention and/or a relaxed form of treatise is often woven with fragments of autobiographical detail--coalesce into a rebuke of history's inauthenticity and theory's arrogant claim on reality. Hoover's concern with language's representational inadequacy is shared by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets he's championed for years in New American Writing and included in his Norton Anthology of Postmodern Verse. However his own poems are more direct, more lyrical, and sometimes seethingly and seductively melancholic. Central to all of them (regardless of language's irrefutable limitations) is his keen intelligence and laconic wit.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
"An eloquent and even elegant book which ... addresses itself to pressing concerns of our culture." -- Chicago Review, Volume 45, Number 1, 1999
"His most imagistically impressionistic is what I would call glancingly accurate." -- The Georgia Review, Spring 1998
"Infused with a rooted emotion delivered calmly and frankly, without either apology or pride." -- American Letters & Commentary, Number 10, 1998
American Heaven
As Quietly As Distant
Baseball
The Beautiful Cities
Beauty
Crow's Meats
Death
Desire
Fog And Smoke On Snow
The Garden
The German Version
Great Expectations
Impossible Object
In A Shadow Gate
The Naked Lunch
The Naked Truth
Night Of The Hunter
Pleasure
Providence
Reason's Eye
Red Lilies
Relative Measures Of Absolute Value
The Same Difference
Savage Commentary
South Of X
Stationary Journey
The Steam Parrot
Theory
Voices Off
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
There is a cool precision in these poems, a striking aptness in the marrying of word to word. And in many of them, there is an unexpected tenderness only half-masked by Hoover's allegiance to exploring and mapping language's inherent imperfection. Over the course of the book the individual poems--in which invention and/or a relaxed form of treatise is often woven with fragments of autobiographical detail--coalesce into a rebuke of history's inauthenticity and theory's arrogant claim on reality. Hoover's concern with language's representational inadequacy is shared by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets he's championed for years in New American Writing and included in his Norton Anthology of Postmodern Verse. However his own poems are more direct, more lyrical, and sometimes seethingly and seductively melancholic. Central to all of them (regardless of language's irrefutable limitations) is his keen intelligence and laconic wit.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
