Even On Parnassus by Lawrence Cottrell is reviewed by Dennis Daly in the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.
“Make it new,” “make it new” the modernist critics and poets admonished their contemporaries and successors. Pound with his Chinese ideograms and imagist poems, Yeats with his Rosicrucian metaphors, Ginsberg with his countercultural and beat sensibilities, Elizabeth Bishop with her polished, somewhat distant take, Robert Duncan with his field philosophy of language, and arguably Gerard Manley Hopkins (who predated the rest) with his sprung rhythm did. Others, interpreting “new” as prose-like or accessibility, opted for the confessional angle (think Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath) or the immediacy of the famous (some would say infamous) Iowa Writers Workshop, which in the persons of Donald Justice, John Berryman, or Rita Dove championed stylish plain-spokenness in both formal and free verse.
