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Nicholas Manning Reviews Judith Bishop

To speak of Judith Bishop's poetry is perhaps to speak, necessarily, of the image. Of course, in the context of 20th century poetics, this term carries within it an unfortunately thorny and convoluted lineage. From Ezra Pound's use of the concept against the Georgians to Ponge's against the Surrealists, the image has always constituted a controversial node, its problems and paradoxes traversing diverse ideological mires of competing poetic modernities.

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Nicholas Manning Reviews Eileen Tabios

In this new century, the writing and rewritings of the poetic self seem to be at the crux of a burgeoning genre; a genre in which the self is less a 'basis' for certain convictions about 'what poetry is' than an opening: an aperture or aporia to diverse inventions, collaborations, languages, traditions, and histories. Seeking diversity over singularity, this 'radical autobiography' seeks articulation across many forms, genres, dialects and discourses.

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Nicholas Manning Reviews Claire Potter and Esther Ottaway

It's difficult not to detect an implicit whiff of politics in Poets Union's choice of two rather different poets for their 2006 Young Poets Fellowships. The coupling of Claire Potter and Esther Ottaway seems to incarnate a certain intriguing editorial magnanimity, a technique that might be termed that of 'covering all bases'. On the one hand, Poets Union can in no way be accused of neglecting an open, communicative and fundamentally accessible poetic, because they have Ottaway; but nor can they be accused of neglecting a more 'experimental' tradition, because they have Potter.

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Nicholas Manning Reviews Jean-Michel Espitallier

To begin with a tentative hypothesis: what is taken from mathematics, in its application to literature, is by definition never its “content”, its undeniable positivism, but rather its formal elements: patterns, figurations, configurations, molds, models, fractals. Mathematics, seen in poetic terms, is thus largely concerned with such questions as the same and the variable, the one and the multiple, the arbitrary and the contingent; and whereas for mathematicians such questions are mere means to achieve verifiable solutions, for poets, they become unique and autonomous ends.

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