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Eye on Life Magazine is a Lifestyle and Literary Magazine. Enjoy articles on gardening, kitchen cooking, poetry, vintage decor, and more.
Born and educate in Romania, her passion and everlasting love has always been writing. Eight of her books have been published since the collapse of communism.
After great reviews and popularity among readers she has been offered a biweekly column in a major newspaper. Her writings are based on personal experience and reflect the perspective of an individual dealing with the complexity of life in two different political regimes.
Read Petra’s Poetry:
During the planning stages for the summer 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and the satellite Cultural Olympiad program, Georgia Review editor Stanley W. Lindberg proposed that the living laureates of literature—they numbered sixteen at the time—should be invited to appear together in Atlanta for an unprecedented multi-day program. His proposal was embraced, and on 23-25 April 1995 eight convened at the Carter Center for readings, panel discussions, press conferences, and social activities. Never before or since have so many of these distinguished prizewinners been in the same room anywhere in the world.
The laureates in attendance were Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Kenzaburo Oe, Octavio Paz, Claude Simon, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott. The introducers and moderators for the event were former President Jimmy Carter, United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove, ABC’s Nightline host Ted Koppel, and Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games President and CEO Billy Payne.
The 350-page Spring 1995 issue of The Georgia Review is entirely given over to the Nobel laureates and comprises the following:
Full texts of the Nobel acceptance lectures given by all sixteen then-living laureates—the eight in attendance plus Saul Bellow, Camilo Jose Cela, Odysseas Elytis, Nadine Gordimer, Halldor Laxness, Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Commissioned original essays on all sixteen laureates, written by a range of notable critics—among them Henry Louis Gates Jr., Trudier Harris, Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard.
Bibliographies, photographs, and original drawings of all the laureates, the last by Darrell Rainey.
Until 31 October, these limited-supply back issues are available as follows: Spring 1995, $20; Winter 1995, $15; both, $30. To order online, click here.
To order by phone, call our offices at 800-542-3481. To order by mail, send a check payable to The Georgia Review to 285 S. Jackson St, Athens, GA 30602-9009.
Announcing the first annual Eye On Life Halloween Poetry feature!
Deadline: Midnight, October 25th, 2010
No entry fee.
Submit no more than five poems using the submission form on this page. Be sure to include your contact information including your mailing address for that bag of candy corn!
Poems should be no more than 300 words. Some offensive language is okay, but please don’t get too over the top. It’s okay to use a classic poetic form (i.e. spooky sonnet, sinister sestina, vindictive villanelle) as long as it actually works, but form is strictly optional. As usual, we want vivid imagery and word usage that stretches the language as it does our imaginations.
Most of the books I review end up given to friends or donated to the public library, but as I look at the forest of post-its bristling from my copy of “Where I Live”, what can I say? The evidence is overwhelming. I am forced to admit that love this book. This one’s a keeper.
I didn’t intend to fall in love. As a reviewer I try to maintain a professional objective distance from my subject so as to omit no grammatical error or jarring accidental change of voice from my relentless and ruthless pursuit of flaws. “Spare the red pen and spoil the poet” is my motto. Yet Maxine’s poetry seduced me with its clarity, wisdom and fearlessness, so that now I have (almost) only praise for it.
Well, all right. I don’t think that “Game” qualifies as a poem. I think it is a paragraph with two sentences that rhyme at the end. I realize that this is a subjective judgment based on a seemingly squishy definition: poetry. Also I am not a laureate-level poet like Maxine.
But my unworthiness to judge notwithstanding, otherwise this is a book in which horses die like beloved children, dogs live a Zen experience and fascinatingly spare pastoral truths explore life with poignancy and zeal.
I particularly enjoyed the poems, “Hay” (“… The old baler cobbled from /other parts, repaired last winter / cussed at in the shed in finger- / splitting cold….”) and “The Rendezvous” that involves a metaphorical encounter with a bear. Not to mention international intrigue, cosmopolitanism and well defined and compelling poetic politics.
This book? Buy it. Buy it NOW.
“Where I Live, New and Selected Poems 1990-2010” by Maxine Kumin, copyright 2010 W.W. Norton and Company
“Much like Woody Allen’s Zelig, my face appears in photographs from Zen centers, martial arts dojos, nuclear physics labs, and cities all over the world. I hope I’ve passed on some of what I’ve learned in the more than two hundred poems I’ve published in journals such as Pearl, Pudding, Slipstream, The New Orphic Review, Iconoclast, Asinine Poetry, Cherry Blossom Review, Colere, Edgz, The Magee Park Anthology, Mannequin Envy, Midway Journal, The New Verse News, Pirene’s Fountain, Plain Spoke, Raving Dove, R-KV-R-Y, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Still Crazy, Straylight, Sunken Lines, Tidepools,and Urthona. My chapbooks have won honorable mentions twice in the San Diego Book Awards. My poem, “Bread and Circuses,” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists contest.”
Read Jon’s Poetry:
You can find Jon’s work elsewhere online at the following locations (by category):
Novels
The Speed of Regret (pen name Ganesha Lightwave)
Stories
Maureen N. McLane is an accomplished writer, poet, critic and teacher. Yet it is because she is so accomplished that I expected more from her latest book, “World Enough”.
I decided to review her book the same way I decide to review any book of poetry. I picked it up off the shelf, opened it to a random page and gave it three chances to speak to me. I read,
“watch the clouds / on any given day / even they don’t keep their shape …
… sociable shifters / bringing weather from elsewhere / until it’s our weather / and we say now it’s raining here”
… and I was sold.
I began to have second thoughts when I read the first poem, “Roundel.” Though well executed within its form, I thought it a poor choice as an opener to engage the reader, and certainly not representative of the poetry that follows throughout the book. Some of the next few poems seem to struggle for direction, some seeming to change their subject completely in the last couple of lines as if unhappy with all the previous lines. Some of the rhymes seemed a little too playful, as if there for their own sake at the expense of meaning. One or two of the longer works made me wish that they were shorter.
Later in the book, however, there began to be poems with phrases that might make you jerk your head around to have a closer look, really make you want to “lunge” for some “seventeenth century tufts of historical lust.” Little gems like “Poussin”, McLane’s celebrated borrowing from “Antigone” in her work, “What A Wonder Is Man”, and fun poems like “Anthropology”. There are glimpses of McLane’s innermost. There are many good poems that leave the reader with a chill, a ponder, a thrill or a smile.
I think the main problem with “World Enough” is the order in which things occur. After reading a few of the stronger poems therein, I went back and read some of the weaker works with a kinder eye. If section III had been moved up front, for example, I would have been much less put off by some of the more rambling, less focused poems that occur earlier in the book. My verdict is that a disinterested critical eye could have turned what is a good book of poetry into a much better book of poetry.
“World Enough” by Maureen N. McLane, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Copyright 2010
Small press: maybe they mean an inkjet printer? Or maybe it’s a bunch of tiny elves in a hollow tree cranking out chapbooks? What do you think?
Anyway, Poets & Writers Magazine is a great place to find publications in which you, yes you, could get published.
Click here for Poets & Writers Magazine
Inspiration:
Definitions from http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=inspiration
Thank you, Google.
An especially unusual creation, this inspiration here written, inspired by you. Aware suddenly of a solution, I reach out on my side of the equarium, splashing an eddy of our fluid cohabitation of time/space concurrent current currently across your way. We connect: inspiring. You certainly are divine. Arousing? Please. And yes I do have a particular action in mind. Sleeping, actually.
Allergens can be inspired or could be inspiring. Anything could be, actually. Poems have been written about cupboards and keys, cans and clapboards, carnations and canola. If you’re lucky you can tell kit from canola.
Inspiration can come within or from without, but without a creative impulse it cannot, for it is that intangible energy that transcends logic and ranges into the realm of art, be it a magnum opus or a better mousetrap, that wells up somehow within as we ponder, think, dream, aspire or desire.
Inspire, be inspired. Write a poem.
H.E. Mantel sends us another timely work just in time for Independence Day here in the United States. Caution, you may find it to be a bit explosive.
Read H. E. Mantel’s new poem: ”-ANTHEM 234-“
