Iron Horse Literary Review

Fall 2001 Book Reviews

After All:  Last Poems

William Matthews.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 2000 $20.00

In his final book, After All: Last Poems, William Matthews questions the reliability of language in human communication. Language, for Matthews, is postmodern and fragmented; it is fractured like the light refracted through a prism; it is endless with its multiple meanings, oxymorons, and obfuscatory qualities; while it is simultaneously clear if siphoned properly.  After All reads like a complex linguistic puzzle, a riddle to be solved...

 

The Blue Guide to Indiana

Michael Martone.  Tallahassee:  Fiction Collective Two, Inc., 2001 $12.95

Deep in the Midwestern Corn Belt is a state filled to the brim with absurdity, a place in which the impractical and downright odd are so commonplace that said region would fit comfortably as a setting in the pages of a Thurber story. The ringworm is a protected species, pork cake is considered a delicacy, people pound eyeless fish piņatas for entertainment, and the great Mayonnaise Pipeline rumbles...

 

Branches

Mitch Cullin.  Sag Harbor, NY:   Permanent Press, 2000.  $22.00

Mitch Cullin has written Branches with the shocking and unrelenting cinematic detail one might expect from Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy. The landscape is sparse West Texas, rugged and calloused like its main character, Sheriff Branches, and it serves well as a place of isolation from outsiders who might otherwise discover the sheriff’s depraved deeds. Like the landscape...

 

Falling Angels

Tracy Chevalier.  London:  HarperCollins, 2001.  $24.95

Having read Tracy Chevalier’s previous novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, straight through, I could not wait for HarperCollins to release the American edition of Chevalier’s latest, Falling Angels. So I ordered the British edition. I was not disappointed. Once again, with intensity and aplomb, Chevalier plunges into history to find the seeds...

 

Setting the World in Order

Rick Campbell. Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ. Press, 2001. $18.95

Although Rick Campbell has traveled around the country and now teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, a Midwestern, working-class sensibility pervades his excellent first collection of poems, Setting the World in Order. The opening inscription, taken from James Wright, sets the tone for the volume...

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After All:  Last Poems

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