Marsh Hawk Press Blog

Norman Finkelstein reviews Paul Pines' DIVINE MADNESS for Jacket! Here's an excerpt:

Paul Pines begins Divine Madness, his remarkable new volume of poetry, with an epigraph from Plato’s Phaedrus: “if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to naught by the poetry of madness. …” Thinking about the title, many readers will also be reminded of Emily Dickinson’s “Much Madness is divinest Sense — / To a discerning Eye —” For Plato, as for the ancient world in general, poetic skill is never sufficient; divine inspiration, or madness, must bring the poetic act to completion. But for Dickinson, living at a time and in a culture where such inspiration was more suspect, the poet possessed of this “divinest sense” risked being seen as dangerous, to be “handled with a Chain —” This volatile dialectic of sense (or sanity) and madness is at the center of Pines’s poetry: not only does it determine the act of writing and the poem’s coming into form, but it is also to be regarded as fundamental to the way in which we think about the world.

You can see the entire review at https://jacket2.org/reviews/divinest-sense-paul-pines

Claudia Carlson is not just one of Marsh Hawk Press' fine poets, but also a stellar book designer. And if you go to http://claudiacarlson.blogspot.com/2013/10/pocket-park-is-published.html, you can see an illustrated article about her process for designing her latest Marsh Hawk Press book, POCKET PARK!

Managing Editor Sandy McIntosh says Claudia's book presents "a real advance for full-color digital printing." Happy Reading!