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Article: Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow.
- Article from:
- Ploughshares
- Article date:
- September 22, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Ploughshares, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Poems by August Kleinzahler. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $19.00 cloth. Reviewed by David Rivard.
August Kleinzahler is a poet whose freshness provokes other poets and critics into describing him as the offspring of unlikely matings. In one book blurb, Thom Gunn brings together Frank O'Hara and Basil Bunting. Helen Vendler, in a recent New Yorker piece, weds Berryman and William Carlos Williams for the same purpose. Maybe Kleinzahler is really the love-child of a menage a trots starring Popeye, Olive Oyl, and the haiku master Basho. In other words, he is what he is (and, Zen-wise, what he isn't, as well).
This need to trace the family tree is a reaction to a ...