The New York Times published some reviews of some recently released poetry books in this past Sunday’s paper. Poets Frederick Seidel, Erin Belieu, Roy Jacobstein, Bill Coyle, Constance Quarterman Bridges, Bill Zavatsky, Cynthia Cruz, Steve Kronen, and Adrian C. Louis are all reviewed.
One of the more positive write-ups is for Bill Zavatsky, where critic Eric McHenry says:
“My heart is in my / pocket,” Frank O’Hara famously wrote, “it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” If there’s a book in Zavatsky’s pocket, it’s poems by Frank O’Hara. A longtime New Yorker and sometime jazz pianist, Zavatsky writes casual, desultory poems of daily urban life. O’Hara seems like a safe bet for his ninth-biggest influence, after seven musicians and the city itself: “I’m lucky / enough to have been handed this / piece of paper twenty minutes ago / by someone on the street who must be / a secret agent for poetry.”
Click the link below and read the rest of this review and all of the others. It is not every day that we can read about poetry and poets in the Old Grey Lady.
