This volume presumes an older one of Selected Poems which was published by New Directions in 1959 and again in 1967 in an enlarged edition with an introduction by Mark Van Doren Van Doren had been Thomas Merton rsquo s university professor and mentor at Columbia It was he who put Merton rsquo s

With these two books of translated sonnets one under its own label and one through a subsidiary Farrar Straus and Giroux tightens its claim to a place on the top rung of literary publishers The sonnet is about as much in vogue these days as the gavotte but we have to admire the great practition

The Face is a sequence of 45 poems many of them previously published in literary journals that add up to a ldquo novella in verse rdquo The very long lines of these poems each trailing over to the next without notable pause bespeak a poetic form leaning to prose but does this ldquo novella

In 1995 in Amazing Grace The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation Jonathan Kozol opened a window on the rock-bottom housing health care and schooling of the Motts Haven enclave in the South Bronx His focus was on children facing the worst possible odds His purpose as declared in t

“El Niño,” the winter child that blows up a storm, is also the name of an oratorio by the modern composer John Adams. It celebrates the coming of the miraculous child, Jesus, as recorded in the Nativity scenes and as interpreted expansively between the scenes, often with Latin Ame

John Simon known for the pungency of his drama and film critiques in New York magazine and elsewhere here delivers himself on writers touched by the spirit of poetrydreamers of dreams in the words of the prophet Joel The principal essays in this collection have appeared from 1991 onwards in Th

In the era of air travel and bullet trains what most people understand by ldquo pilgrimage rdquo says Anne McPherson is ldquo a beeline trip to a distant goal rdquo She herself has lived by an older French notion ldquo walking to the saints rdquo For the pilgrims to the shrine of St Jam

Traffic, an Academy Awards nominee film directed by Steven Soderbergh, is a rapid-fire saga of the drug trade and of stumbling binational efforts to stop it. It is also a dark-hued morality play. The drug trading and the violence in Traffic take place on both sides of the border crossing between Tij

On Dec. 1, while George W. Bush and Al Gore were hacking their way through legal thickets, Vicente Fox Quesada strode into the presidency of the United States of Mexico. It was a holiday that elicited from Mexicans, whose history has made them very cautious, much more hope than they are used to feel

This book honors a 12-year-old martyr by the name of FoyFaith in Englishin the southwest of France during the last of the Roman persecutions in A D 303 Five centuries later in what is called a Furtive Translation or pious robbery her remains were carried off from Agen in the Garonne to the to