Michael O’Brien in Boston Review

Stephen Burt reviews Michael O’Brien’s Avenue and Craig Dworkin’s Motes in the new issue of Boston Review (January/Feburary 2013): “O’Brien has been publishing verse since the 1960s; he writes these sort of Williams-esque poems as well as anyone since Williams (who helped to invent the modes in which Dworkin works, too). Yet O’Brien also seeks a quiet sublimity that Williams’s mimetic, photograph-like miniatures rarely found: a poem is for O’Brien ‘A dream of perfect understanding. / A flower carried home in a child’s notebook,’ which is to say that it only looks like it will last. . . . Poems are like flutes, like escalators, like birds, like American Sign Language (the girls may be deaf); the poet sets out not to depict one thing but to travel, and to communicate, across a populated world.” The full review can be found on Poetry Daily‘s “prose feature”; order the book here.