Dirda

Her collection Nox New Directions, $35 - reviewed at fuller length in these pages by Michael Dirda on April 28, 2010 - is a fascinating mix of elegy and history that at times is overshadowed by the book's unusual design.

Five finalists for National Book Critics Circle award in poetry 2011

That Dirda lets loose in this way suggests to me that he and his fellow ink-stained wretches really do think litblogs are threatening to make them obsolete.

Book Reviewing 2010

I have to say that the fury Dirda expresses in these comments takes me somewhat aback.

Book Reviewing 2010

Her collection Nox New Directions, $35 - reviewed at fuller length in these pages by Michael Dirda on April 28, 2010 - is a fascinating mix of elegy and history that at times is overshadowed by the book's unusual design.

Five finalists for National Book Critics Circle award in poetry 2011

Michael Dirda, who usually reviews on Thursday, is away.

'Gryphon: New and Selected Stories,' by Charles Baxter: Short but potent 2011

Dirda makes some attempt to weave in the occasional critical observation ( "The hallmark of Patricia Highsmith's work is a calm, hallucinatory intensity built on sentences of unemotional plainness and clarity"), but if anyone is looking to find in his review some critical discernment beyond the usual sort of thing said about Highsmith's fiction (it "probes the fluid nature of identity," is "bleak" and "upsetting"), such is not to be found here.

Book Reviewing 2010

Michael Dirda, who won a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism, said: I'm pleased by this selection because poets need all the help they can get.

Swedish Poet Wins Nobel Prize in Literature; 'Fresh Access to Reality' Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg 2011

Playground bullies operate from a position of power, and it would appear that Dirda thinks litbloggers have seized it (and that he and his colleagues are victims.)

Book Reviewing 2010

Michael Dirda, who usually reviews on Thursday, is away.

'Gryphon: New and Selected Stories,' by Charles Baxter: Short but potent 2011

-- Michael Dirda praised the eloquent and revealing correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, gathered in its entirety in Words in Air (Farrar Straus Giroux, $26): "Anybody who cares about poetry will want to read it," Dirda wrote.

Paperback roundup: 'The Homemade Life,' by Molly Wizenberg Nora Krug 2010