Long regarded in the United Kingdom as one of its most distinguished contemporary poets, Robinson has also won critical recognition from venerated Americans of letters. Marjorie Perloff penned a glowing blurb for the back cover of Return to Sendai during the last year of her life: “Peter Robinson has been enchanting us with his quietly meditative poems — poems that prefer to ‘leave the threads dangling’ rather than to provide any sort of closure. 

The link between form and content is, of course, rarely clear cut — despite Robert Creeley’s (and then Charles Olson’s) influential assertion that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” — but just because total mimesis isn’t attainable doesn’t mean that a certain charge can’t be derived from forms that echo their subject matter. […] These thoughts are prompted by Joel Chace’s new collection Underrated Provinces.

Place the tip of your tongue in different positions, and you might find yourself pronouncing your Ss like SH. For most of us, that means something about how we speak to and understand each other. For phoneticians, this introduces questions of articulation and apicality. For poet Jean Day however, the term Apicality lends her latest book of poems its name. 

Teetering in a liminal space between a long poem and a consortium of compact lyrical statements, Executive Orders makes use of a kind of ludic legalese intended as a counterpoint to the unilateralism of Donald Trump’s heavy-handed use of executive power. By the same stroke, it broaches broader questions about how the social fabric of our lives relates to the impersonal ubiquity of technology today. By opposing poetry’s negative capability — its capacity to flow against factual uniformities — to the crushing realities of executive legislation, the book maintains a subdued sense of communitarianism.