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The Manhattan Review – Winter/Spring 2005

Volume 11 Number 2

Winter/Spring 2005

Biannual

Mark Cunningham

A good publication to consult for fine contemporary poetry, The Manhattan Review here offers a special double issue for the 2005 Winter/Spring volume. A good publication to consult for fine contemporary poetry, The Manhattan Review here offers a special double issue for the 2005 Winter/Spring volume. It caused me some admiring surprise to deduce that The Manhattan Review is, so far as I can tell, unaffiliated with any university, because the non-poetry contents featured in this issue flex a peculiar intellectual muscularity—which is not to say they come off as collegiate or stuffy; they consist entirely of material devoted to the life and work of the late British poet Peter Redgrove, and are shot through with delightful and discursive smartness. In a fascinating lengthy interview with Manhattan Review editor Philip Fried (conducted in 1982), Redgrove’s discussion meanders brilliantly through Jung and Freud, Plath and Hughes, Joseph Campbell, Rimbaud, Baudeliare, Boris Karloff, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Lewis Carroll, Robert Lowell, and beyond. Among the banquet of poetry by some 23 poets in this issue are a great number of moving and memorable passages that alone recommend The Manhattan Review as being worthy of constant and considered perusal. This from Polly Clark’s unique and affecting love poem, hinging on a wonderfully unlikely metaphor, “You Are My America”: “I land exhausted, with only / a suitcase, broken open, / and at your feet I begin / my book of declarations / that will be our history, / that will make us brand new people.”
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