NBCC poetry award winner Susan Stewart’s picks for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:
Michael Krüger, The Executor, Harcourt.
This brief novel fits together as elegantly as a polished wooden puzzle with hidden dowels; the bleak news it conveys about literary friendship is undermined by Krüger’s comic outlook and, as always in his poetry and fiction, his tenderness toward what remains of the natural world] Harcourt
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This is a beautifully made series of poems that reflect upon, and refract, one another with the clarity of early light. His voices are as immediate and pressing as ever, yet a quiet sense of refrain and a pattern of musical turns that come and go like the seasons make this one of his most moving books.—Susan Stewart