"Still life does its political work not polemically but by awakening and sustaining our desire for an 'amenable world.' In this splendid book Bonnie Costello, one of our most important scholars of twentieth-century poetry, teaches us to draw sustenance from the genre Pliny the Elder called 'the lowest of the art forms,' but whose mandate in dark times is to remind us 'just how fragile ordinary living really is.' Costello is deeply conversant with both lyric poetry and visual art; she is also more broadly committed to exploring how artistic choices come to have political meaning. This is poetry criticism at its most buoyant and supple—a quietly luminous book."
"Bonnie Costello, long recognized as among our most gifted readers of modern poems, additionally brings to her new book her extensive knowledge of the visual arts and her acuity about broader issues in poetics. Persuasively establishing still life as paradigmatic of how the lyric mode relates public and private worlds, Planets on Tables will be of interest not only to students of modernism but also to anyone engaged with lyric poetry."
"A beautifully written study of modern American poetry and the still life, Planets on Tables shows how object poems, far from retreating into the static decorum of miniature, subtly register the large-scale shocks of history. Nuanced and superbly lucid, Bonnie Costello's readings reveal lyric poetry's interweaving of inner and outer worlds, war and household interiors, public and private spheres. This book renews our sense of the power of poetry to be true to the incessant interplay between the imagination and the planet of which it is a part."
"Bonnie Costello argues for still life as a mode of juxtaposition that can hold contrary ideas at a standstill without merging or synthesizing them. Far from being a minor genre, still life becomes, for the author, the aesthetic end of the more politicized modernism of the 1930s (a point that is qualitatively different from the argument that still life was deliberately aesthetic). In Costello's modeling, still life is not restricted to its material components but can include radio waves, foreign news, technology, cinema, even the artist's vocation. . . . She concentrates on one visual artist, Joseph Cornell, juxtaposing him to canonical American poets Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and the academically undertreated Richard Wilbur. In so doing, she virtually wipes out the past generation's distinction between the subjective Stevens and the quasi-objective Williams—a fruitful side effect of her inventive exploration of intermedial crossings."—Choice
"A beautifully written study of modern American poetry and the still life, Planets on Tables shows how object poems, far from retreating into the static decorum of miniature, subtly register the large-scale shocks of history. Nuanced and superbly lucid, Bonnie Costello's readings reveal lyric poetry's interweaving of inner and outer worlds, war and household interiors, public and private spheres. This book renews our sense of the power of poetry to be true to the incessant interplay between the imagination and the planet of which it is a part."—Jahan Ramazani, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia
"Still life does its political work not polemically but by awakening and sustaining our desire for an 'amenable world.' In this splendid book Bonnie Costello, one of our most important scholars of twentieth-century poetry, teaches us to draw sustenance from the genre Pliny the Elder called 'the lowest of the art forms,' but whose mandate in dark times is to remind us 'just how fragile ordinary living really is.' Costello is deeply conversant with both lyric poetry and visual art; she is also more broadly committed to exploring how artistic choices come to have political meaning. This is poetry criticism at its most buoyant and supple—a quietly luminous book."—Jane Hedley, K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College
"Bonnie Costello, long recognized as among our most gifted readers of modern poems, additionally brings to her new book her extensive knowledge of the visual arts and her acuity about broader issues in poetics. Persuasively establishing still life as paradigmatic of how the lyric mode relates public and private worlds, Planets on Tables will be of interest not only to students of modernism but also to anyone engaged with lyric poetry."—Heather Dubrow, author of The Challenges of Orpheus and Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor of English, University of Wisconsin–Madison
