Roslyn Orlando’s Ekhō: A Poem in Three Parts gives voice to two unlikely poet-speakers: Ekhō, the Greek nymph famously condemned to repeat the words of others, and Alexa, the artificial voice emanating from Amazon’s popular Echo speakers.

Perhaps you’re like me, and you walk around during the day innocently enough, if with a host of questions about poetry in the back of your mind, and from time to time, when crossing a street, or walking down a long avenue, you pull out them and wonder about them some more. […] James Loop’s Metronome brought these questions to mind, in productive, pleasing ways. Its 43 poems span 118 pages. Its back cover announces that the volume contains poems written over a decade, and so it advertises itself as a sort of selected poetry volume.

Long regarded in the United Kingdom as one of its most distinguished contemporary poets, Robinson has also won critical recognition from venerated Americans of letters. Marjorie Perloff penned a glowing blurb for the back cover of Return to Sendai during the last year of her life: “Peter Robinson has been enchanting us with his quietly meditative poems — poems that prefer to ‘leave the threads dangling’ rather than to provide any sort of closure. 

The link between form and content is, of course, rarely clear cut — despite Robert Creeley’s (and then Charles Olson’s) influential assertion that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” — but just because total mimesis isn’t attainable doesn’t mean that a certain charge can’t be derived from forms that echo their subject matter. […] These thoughts are prompted by Joel Chace’s new collection Underrated Provinces.