Water Lilies, White Violets

Muted Music

on How Courts Govern America by Richard Neely

on The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw by Bernard F. Dukore

Gerald Weales’s “American Theater Watch” appeared in these pages from 1978 until 2010, and we have also featured on occasion his essays and reviews on topics that have included World War II and the early-career political cartoons of one Theodore Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss). In addition to his distinguished career as an author and drama specialist, Weales was a longtime professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he retired in 1987; a senior Fulbright scholar at the University of Sri Lanka; and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.

A Remarkable Diversity (on A Glass Face in the Rain by William Stafford; This Journey by James Wright; The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché; & The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems by Denis Johnson)

Homage to a Mystery Boy (on American Journal: Poems by Robert Hayden)

How Many Bibles? (on The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter; & The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop Frye)

Photography Raw / Photography Cooked (on The Work of Atget: Old France by John Szarkowski, Maria Morris Hambourg; Three Seconds from Eternity by Robert Doisneau; William Klein, Photographs: New York and Rome also Moscow and Tokyo also Elsewhere, Etc. by William Klein, John Heilpern; & Hearts of Darkness by Don McCullin, John Le Carré)

The Dinner

Stephen Dunn is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. His Degrees of Fidelity: Essays on Poetry and the Latitudes of the Personal,  is due out from Tiger Bark Press in October 2018, and a new collection of poems, Pagan Virtues, is scheduled to be published by W. W. Norton in 2019. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Different Hours, and he has had fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. Dunn lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, the writer Barbara Hurd.