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Beloit Poetry Journal – Spring 2007

Volume 57 Number 3

Spring 2007

Quarterly

Jennifer Gomoll Popolis

BPJ publishes some serious poetry, and by that I mean finely-tuned, well-crafted poems that may require two or three or twenty readings to reveal themselves to you. There’s nothing “fun” or “hip” here, and I say this not as a value judgment on “fun” or “hip” or even “serious,” but so that readers new to this venerated journal know what to expect.

BPJ publishes some serious poetry, and by that I mean finely-tuned, well-crafted poems that may require two or three or twenty readings to reveal themselves to you. There’s nothing “fun” or “hip” here, and I say this not as a value judgment on “fun” or “hip” or even “serious,” but so that readers new to this venerated journal know what to expect. I enjoyed Erin Malone’s “The Winter He Is One,” in which a mother shares a quiet winter moment with her child out by the horse stables, feeling, finally, as if she has been broken into motherhood. Mary Molinary’s “Watery Shapes” is a short piece about our human fears (“we all see strangers we all see shapes coming over the horizon on thin-legged / horses”) that I liked so much, I think I can get past the rest of her incredibly dry selection. David Camphouse’s clear, passionate voice is the brightest spot here; his “Jeremiad for Spring” is a foreboding, impeccable poem about the psychological and environmental aftermath of rural decay in “the corn-belt // in the age of AIDS, of erosion – / whole histories gone in a wash / of acid rain and crystal meth.” My overall enthusiasm for the BPJ is dampened by a messy prose poem or two, but I’m going to recommend it even so; its poems are worth considering carefully as some of the best published today, and you’ll get much out of deciding for yourself how well they stack up.

[www.bpj.org]

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