An infinite variety of form: A review of Allan Kolski Horwitz's There are Two Birds at my Window

When you scan the title of this volume, you make an important discovery: the personal pronoun is unstressed, and that is the key to appreciating a remarkable poet. The stressed parts are the two birds and the window. The birds symbolise the world and the soul; the window is the threshold, the veil, where art and nature merge. Horwitz is a poet of what Keats called “gusto”, that is a recognition of the necessity of opposites, as binaries (the world) and as paradoxes (the soul).

The first poem, “Mzansi, my Beginning – Mzansi, my End”, alludes to Allen Ginsberg – another Jewish poet a long way from his spiritual home in the desert where you lose yourself to find yourself....Read more here

Gail Dendy’s vivid and exhaustive sketch of life: a review of Closer Than That, by John Eppel

When I first read Gail Dendy’s poems I discerned something dance-like in their cadences, seldom continuous like the above examples, but sporadic, light-footed. After a few more readings, I discerned her technique: the strategic placement within prosaic, barely scannable phrases, of three-syllable feet. In “The Apprentice”, a re-telling of the creation story, she employs dactyls: “moistened the”; “felt how it”; “fashioned a”; “breath from my”; “this was the”; “called it a”; “sooner had”, and so on...Read more here