The Radiance of Pigs: Poems

Stan Rice's poems are outside the circle of coventional poetry in their adherence to the strong, expressionist drive which makes his work so interesting as well as entirely his own. People tend to have strong opinions about his work, which led Publisher's Weekly to describe anearlier volume of new and selected poems, Singing Yet, as "serious stuff, urgent and original." His last book, Fear Itself, in its wild unpredictability, received praise from Graham Christian in Library Journal as follows: "Rice is an expert practitioner of the paranoiac-surreal; he walks the disquieting dreamscape familiar from the work of such poets as Galway Kinnell and Charles Simic . . . His truesubject is the uneasy equation between horror and beauty, the 'liquification of flame' and the horror of order. He is often capable of delivering the instructive surprises of the best poetry." The same doomsday energy and observation suffuse his new work.