From Library Journal
Gardner (English, Virginia Polytechnic Inst.) begins this highly academic study of modernism in contemporary poetry with the bold statement, "Charles Altieri, Marjorie Perloff, and Helen Vendler are the major voices whose work this book is most in conversation with." Basing his argument on the notion that "poetry takes place within spaces where we live out the truth of skepticism," Gardner attempts to construct an ideological criticism about modern poetics from Elizabeth Bishop to John Ashbery to--the real three subjects of this study--Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, and Michael Palmer. Each of these three is featured in a long essay, followed by the transcription of an interview. Aimed at those who are interested in approaching linguistics or poetics as "notions of the limits of knowledge" or "the fragility of signification" and as spaces of "linguistic uncertainty," this book is recommended only for those scholars who are comfortable uttering the names Ezra Pound and Jorie Graham in the same sentence.-Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Regions of Unlikeness Thomas Gardner explores the ways a number of quite different twentieth-century American poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, and Michael Palmer, frame their work as taking place within, and being brought to life by, an acknowledgment of the limits of language. Gardner approaches their poetry in light of philosopher Stanley Cavell's remarkably similar engagement with the issues of skepticism and linguistic finitude. The skeptic's refusal to settle for anything less than perfect knowledge of the world, Cavell maintains, amounts to a refusal to accept the fact of human finitude, Gardner argues that both Cavell and the poets he discusses reject skepticism's world-erasing conclusions but nonetheless honor the truth about the limits of knowledge the skepticism keeps alive.

FROM THE CRITICS

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