February Review Round-Up

Here at David R. Godine, Publisher, we strive to produce high quality books above all else. So, when our books and authors are praised, we hope you'll forgive us for acting like proud parents. Please join us in celebrating the recent success of a few of our talented authors.

The Poetry Society has announced Naomi Replanski as the 2013 recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award, given each year to a book of poetry written by a single author and published by a small, non-profit, or University Press. On the Poetry Society's website, B.H Fairchild writes:

Replansky has become the master of a Blakean music radically unfashionable in its devotion to song-like meters and the reality and politics of working-class experience. For those of us who came upon her poems half a century ago, the appearance of Replansky's Collected Poems is cause for celebration and, as an expression of deep gratitude and woefully belated recognition, the conferring of the William Carlos Williams Award.

The full text can be seen here, and be sure to find Naomi Replanski's Collected Poems on the Black Sparrow Books website.

Adam Van Doren's book An Artist In Venice - featured in last month's round-up as well - continues to receive high praise. The Boston Globe believes he does justice to a city that has been written about for centuries:

Van Doren, a master of light and grandson of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren, is an amiable companion as he goes about exploring the city, sketchbook and notebook in hand. “An Artist in Venice” (Godine) succeeds as a memoir of discovery and a portfolio of paintings and sketches. His dreamy, richly hued works, none more than six and a half inches tall, are beautifully reproduced.

The full review can be read here.

Ralph Gardner Jr. of the Wall Street Journal also acknowledges the fact that Van Doren is tackling "one of the best-known, and most thoroughly researched, subjects in all of art and literature." Yet Van Doren's paintings, like the city, are easy to love:

...those who fall in love with Venice tend to do so completely. And rapture is easier to portray than mixed emotions. I had a second minor revelation as I examined Mr. Van Doren’s paintings. (He must be doing something right, because I rarely have any revelations, let alone two triggered by the same artist.) Perhaps more than any other city, when you’re painting Venice you’re simultaneously painting nature. New York, by contrast, is a man-made world...But Venice can’t be separated from the sea, which surrounds and more than occasionally engulfs it; or from the interplay of architecture, sea and sky.

Van Doren's paintings demonstrate the manner in which "nature worms its way into the perception of the city," writes Gartner. The author's architectural background provides him with the talent of "insinuating precision with the fewest possible brush strokes." An Artist in Venice is also a memoir, "a lively account of living in the city" and the author's adventures there.

Continue reading Gartner's article here, and find An Artist in Venice on our website.

The New York Daily News recognizes Andrew Alpern's documentation of New York's holdouts, "about 50 bygone-era buildings in Manhattan," in his book Holdouts! The Buildings That Got in the Way. in the full article, you can read  testimonials from residents and see photographs of what some of these holdouts look like.

For a full account of these endangered structures, you can purchase Holdouts! The Buildings That Got in the Way on our website.

More new and noteworthy books can be found on the homepage of Godine's website, along with a host of high quality selections.