Poems Books

Perhaps one of the most powerful yet ignored American voices of his time was Melvin Tolson, whose work unashamedly demanded a level of literacy and general knowledge only to be found in the classic talented fraction of any population. Born in the late 19th century he was educated and became a college professor against the odds of racial injustice, and rose above those circumstances to inspire generations after him to achieve excellence in spite of difficult odds.

Tolson's "Dark Symphony" particularly excited this writer, who saw him read excerepts from this piece when he visited his Alma Mater(and mine), Lincoln University Penna., six months before he died in 1966. His work is so classic that in time Tolson, I believe, will become "Poet Laureate of the U.S." the country he so loved.

Melvin B. Tolson was recognized as one of the first African American poets whose poetry has been classified as being in the esoteric category. The implication of this statement means that Tolson was writing poetry in a format which would be acceptable by the greatest English and American poets. One of them who recognized Tolson was W.H. Auden, who wrote favorable reviews about Tolson's poetry. Tolson, who came after the last years of the Harlem Renissance era, knew many of the prominent writers and poets of that era, which lasted from the 1920s through the 1930s. He knew many of the well known writers and poets of that period, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Hurston, V.F. Cavington, Ralph Ellison, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, W.E.B. Dubios, James Weldon Johnson and Charles S. Johnson. While he was at Wiley College, Marshall, Texas, Tolson established his reputation by publishing his first book of poems entitled, Rendezvous with America, in 1944. For years prior to that date, Tolson taught English classes to thousands of students since his arrival there from Lincoln University, Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1923. Also he was the coach of the famous Wiley College Debate Team, which included, James Farmer, who later became the founder of the CORE Civil Rights Organization.

Raymond Nelson edits Harlem Gallery And Other Poems Of Melvin B. Tolson (1865-0), which presents works from one of the most recognized black voices in American poetry. His poems are here organized by topic and include notes for further study.

"Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board."

In a short, tumultous life, Hart Crane (1899 -- 1932) wrote two of the greatest books of 20th Century American poetry: White Buildings (1926) and the Bridge (1930) as well as some splendid individual poems. His poetry is collected in this outstanding volume of the Library of America, edited by Langdon Hammer of Yale University.

Of the 850 pages of this book, only 144 are devoted to Crane's poetry. Most of the remainder of the text consists of 14 short essays by Crane and of 412 letters from his extensive correspondence written between 1910 and his suicide in 1932. These letters, together with Professor Hammer's notes and biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents, offer the reader a good portrait of Crane's troubled life, and they read with more immediacy and poignancy than any biography.

Crane dropped out of high school and left an unhappy home in Cleveland at the age of 17 to try to make his way as a poet in New York. Many of the letters in this collection detail Crane's stormy relationship with his parents, his father Clarence ("C.A.") Crane, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer, and his mother Grace Hart Crane. Crane was also close to his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Belden Hart. In the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge, Crane said that the he had to "Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage". His difficult, shifting relationship with his family is amply chronicled in these letters.

But this collection includes much more than correspondence with a broken family. They offer insight into Crane's poetic ambitions and into the composition of The Bridge and of the shorter poems. They offer a view of New York City, seen through Crane's eyes, and of his literary friends and contemporaries, including Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Malcolm Cowley, Peggy Cowley, Crane's patron Otto Kahn, and many others. The letters give the reader a portrait of a complex, troubled person who from late adolescence lived life hard and on the edge. Crane was promiscuous with a lengthy series of mostly homosexual affairs together with longer-term relationships with men and women. Crane's most intense male relationship was with a sailor named Emil Opffer (none of his letters to Opffer survive) and, just before his death, he had a passionate heterosexual relationship in Mexico with Peggy Cowley, as she was divorcing Malcolm Cowley. From his mid-20s Crane had deep problems with alcoholism which greatly hindered his ability to write. He was perpetually short of money and cadged and borrowed extensively from his friends and family. He fought constantly and was jailed several times. In a fit of depression -- when his life superficially seemed to be looking up he committed suicide by jumping off a ship, the Orizaba, en route from Cuba to New York City.

Read as a whole, this collection of Crane's correspondence and poetry raises difficult and probably unanswerable questions about the relationship between Crane's life and his work. Crane's excesses and passions in fact are an important component of his poetry. But while the life was a failure, Crane was a poet of romantic vision. Crane struggled for years to complete "The Bridge", a work which remains controversial and not unqualifiedly successful. In this poem, Crane took the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol and tried to create a myth, in the machine age, that would unite America's past with its future and also give meaning to his own life. (Much of The Bride is autobiographical.) The Bridge is a work of difficult optimism as Crane traces America back to the voyages of Columbus and the days of Pocahontas with Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe as guides. The poems ends on a note of affirmation and hope, as The Bridge becomes a path to transcendence and to the overcoming of materialism and lifeless routine through love and brotherhood.

Crane's short poems are higly concentrated and difficult. The poems I find most rewarding in "White Buildings" include "Voyages" a six-poem sequence detailing an intense love affair and "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" which is a predecessor of "The Bridge." The shorter poems include "At Mellvile's Tomb", the subject of an exchange with Harriet Monroe included in this collection, and "Chaplinesque."

One of Crane's masterpieces is his final poem "The Broken Tower" which describes how "I entered the broken world/To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/An instant in the wind." The Broken Tower ends on a note on the redemptive power of love while, soon after completing the poem, Hart Crane would commit suicide.

This is a volume that will bring Hart Crane to his readers. The letters chronicle a sad life cut short by excess. But Hart Crane's poetry, brief in amount though it is, has stayed with and inspired me for many years. Hart Crane holds a high place in America's literary heritage. He deserves his place in the Library of America.

The quotation at the beginning of this review is from Robert Lowell's sonnet "Words for Hart Crane" in his collection "Life Studies".

Robin Friedman

Hart Crane is one of those powerful poetic voices that is its own style and immensely attractive. As others have noted, he was modern for his time, clearly American, and yet full of the great poetic traditions of the English language. His influences are identified directly in his works. He talks to Walt Whitman and discusses Emily Dickinson, Chaplin, Poe, and others. His early death was a great loss to English letters and the American voice in the 20th Century.

This wonderful volume from the Library of America (remember to thank them with your purchases and donations - they are non-profit after all) is more than eight-hundred pages, but only a few more than one-hundred of them contain all of Crane's poetry (including fragments). A few more have some essays and prose. The rest are filled with more than four hundred letters that Crane wrote to his parents, his friends, his literary associates, and others. The letters help us put Crane's work into a richer context, allow us to see some of the published works in earlier states, and make us ache and wonder what might have been if he hadn't jumped off the deck of the "Orizaba" into the Caribbean in 1932.

To provide just one tiny sample that amazed me from "Cape Hatteras" in "The Bridge" (Crane's great work) [the ellipsis in the second line is in the poem]:

Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space . . .
O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers!
There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk
Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;
Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered
Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun
What ciphers risen from prophetic script,
What marathons new-set between the stars!
The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches
Already knows the closer clasp of Mars, --
New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place
To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!

We can hear his lyric voice, see his fresh images, and his ability to form the words into powerful energy. This is the result of great talent married to hard work and a special sensitivity to the language. Harold Bloom call's Crane "our Pindar". Now, I think there is more to this image than the linking of two lyric poets. Most of Pindar's poetry is lost to us. One set of odes is complete, and the others survive as fragments. Even though Pindar died old and Crane died young, we wonder about what we might have had from both if Pindar's work had found a way to survive and Crane had found a way to live.

Some say that it was the oppression society put on Crane because of his homosexuality (bi-sexuality?). However, almost all the homosexuals in Crane's time did not commit suicide, and a fair percentage of the people that did commit suicide were heterosexual. The poet grew up in a chaotic family. Yes, his father became a successful businessman with his syrup factory (he also invented and sold the rights to Life Saver candies for a pittance), but Crane's mother and father fought constantly and melodramatically. So much so that Crane dropped out before finishing high school and moved away to New York. The poet's own emotional life was harsh and prone to self-destructive behavior including alcoholism. After 1927 his drinking became much worse. When you combine the home life that formed his emotional responses with his parents divorcing, his father dying suddenly, his mother's neediness, his failure to produce much work during his year in Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship, the affair with Peggy Baird Cowley (the soon to be ex-wife of a friend), his discovery that the inheritance from his maternal grandmother that had been held in trust for him was gone because of a loan his father guaranteed with it, along with being beaten up aboard ship for making a pass at one of the crew and then getting seriously drunk, well, stepping off the boat into the sea in front of witnesses while exclaiming, "Good-bye, everybody!" isn't as big a leap as one might at first suppose.

But what a loss to us all.

This is a fine volume. The editor has provided biographical material for the people mentioned in the letters, notes on sources, notes for the text (including a fine foreword), and an especially helpful chronology of Crane's too brief life.

Hart Crane is a poet I did not know anything about until I had read Harold Bloom's introduction to his "American Religious Poems". Then I knew I had to get this volume and learn more about this important and brilliant poet. You might want to get to know his work and his life, as well.

As an American boy growing up in Normandy, I would sit for hours, homesick, on the cliffs overlooking the Channel, thinking that if the fog ever lifted I could see Manhattan. And I would recite from WHITE BUILDINGS for hours, crying out to the fates that had separated me from my homeland, as Hart Crane had bubbled his way to the bottom of a purple sea some miles away I assumed. "As bells off San Salvador/ Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,/ In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--/ Adagios of islands, O my prodigal,/ Complete the dark confession her veins spell." I hardly knew what I was saying, but some charms really do work and it wasn't long before I was repatriated, mouth first. I hope it's not heretical to suggest that Hart Crane's letters, while never less than interesting and often amusing, aren't that superb, and the book seems padded out in consequence to fit the desired "heft" of Library of America volumes. The Board might as well get used to the notion that not all poets have written thousands of pages, and for every Whitman you get a Hart Crane, who just didn't write very much. Does he deserve a place on the shelf with his 144 pages of poetry? Maybe there are some packing issues I don't understand, but otherwise, sure, throw in four hundred pages of Crane's letters.

Though nothing could really top the exquisite if critical presentation that the late Thomas Parkinson gave to his edition of the Crane-Yvor Winters correspondence, Langdon Hammer is able, through the sheer gift of size, to expand upon what we've had and complicate our hitherto too perfect picture of Crane. Crane's letters to Slater Brown and Wilbur Underwood are the liveliest, perhaps, but women also animate him and a recent biography that excoriated Crane for his misogyny seems sadly off the mark. However some biographers will do anything to create a scandal. One might profitably read through these letters to find out what Crane recommends in the way of early American modernism, his peers, because in general his taste is pretty good (and his dismissals of overrated trash are classics of vinegary invective). Of course he can sometimes gild the lily when praising, say, Harry Crosby's poems in a letter to his putative patron.

The index may be the single most useful feature of the poems + letters arrangement, for the index will help us find what Crane had to say about X or Y of his poems as he was writing them. He wrote, for example, a wonderfully impassioned letter to Otto Kahn, the industrial magnate who financed the writing of THE BRIDGE, outlining the different sections he had already finished and those still in the pipeline. Kahn also helped to finance the Metropolitan Opera, and Crane asks Kahn's help in finding employment there as a copywriter. He had the personality of a basso profundo; I wonder if the opera world would have changed if Hart Crane had been more in it.

I love this book so much that I just had to take a moment to write a review. As women, we live very busy and complicated lives and this book has a way of making everything in our lives, and hearts, make sense. I have laughed and cried while reading it! I imagine when I'm done reading it, I will read it all over again. I love it so much that I am ordering another one for my mother-in-law, just because. Thank you Sheryl Roush for putting together this wonderful collection of stories, quotes, etc.; it has touched my heart!

In the ongoing quest to understand myself and others, I often look for insight. Heart of a Woman is a treasure trove of inspirational insights into the hearts of women as they, and as men who love them, tell it. Sheryl Roush has compiled a wonderful resource that just makes you feel good for having picked it up and read an entry or two.

This is a beautiful compilation of treasured stories.
My thanks to Ms. Roush for her time and effort to bring them to so many.

This amazing author just got my attention. He writes in a way I have never seen before. He caught my eyes to the book cover, and its content. Good poems, which tell us how gay man lives in Brazil. A country side city can both gives you a real lover, as put your sexuality in doubt... How to go on living, if you do not accept to be as you are??? Find answers in this wonderful author words.

...Dear writer, You were SO lucky when God choose you to write poems for the gay people. It is the most amazing book I ever saw and maybe it won't appear another similar book... You are so hearty when you tell about your lovers throu poems. Thanks God for that gift and keep writting, because you OWN the tool.
Your book was so helpful to me: I was crying my pains and now I am smiling when I open the book and see poems like "My Love Gel" (page 18). (...).

Do you know when you read a book and you can not stop reading and even when you read it all, you don't realize the book is finished??? That was my impression to this book. I read and read it again and now I will pass to my nephew (he is an not open gay) and hope it can bring him some strengh to come out from the closet, just as Valdeck did.

....When beginning to read this anthology, I was already familiar with most of his essays but had had only limited exposure to his poems which comprise about a third of this volume’s contents. Thoreau was a man of great intellectual courage while possessing at the same time an uncommon sensitivity to the natural world in which he seemed to be most comfortable. Within the context of American society during the mid-19th century, it is interesting to observe his development of concepts such as civil disobedience which later had such a profound influence on the thinking of public leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. I have always admired the rigor of Thoreau’s intellect which is evident in abundance throughout his published works. While proceeding through this single volume in which most of his essays and his poems are arranged in sequence, I developed a much greater appreciation of (for lack of a better term) his “humanity.” Those who desire a wider and deeper context for consideration of these works are urged to read Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau as well as Robert D. Richardson’s two biographies, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: The Mind on Fire.

Henry David Thoreau, born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817, was one of the co-founders and most influential representatives of the philosophical school known as "Transcendentalism." (Others include fellow Concord residents Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, reformist teacher and father of Louisa May Alcott.) Thoreau's life centered around his home town; yet, as his writings reflect, he was very familiar with all major philosophical schools of his time, not only those developing in America but also the writings of Kant, Goethe, Schiller and Hegel - indeed, the very term "transcendentalist" derives, as Emerson explained, from Kant, who had first recognized intuitive thought as a kind of thought in its own right, holding "that there was a very important class of ideas ... which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired ... [and which] were intuitions of the mind itself." These were the ideas which Kant had called "transcendental forms." (Or, as Thoreau himself once put it in his Journal: "I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.")

To this day, transcendentalist philosophy, and Thoreau's work in particular, has proven enormously influential - on the program of the British Labour Party as much as on people as diverse as spiritual leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. on the one hand and rock star Don Henley on the other hand. Henley in the 1990s even went so far as to found the Walden Woods Project, teaming up with the Thoreau Society to preserve as much as possible of Walden Woods and the land around Concord, and foster education about Thoreau. Yet, during his life time only few of his many works, now considered so influential, were published, and even those did not find wide distribution. "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself," he commented on the poor sales of his "Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers."

This collection, one of two Library of America volumes dedicated to Thoreau's works and edited by renowned Thoreau scholar Elizabeth Hall Witherell, presents the majority of his essays and poems, from well-known works such as "Civil Disobedience," "Life Without Principle" and "Walking" to a large body of lesser known (but just as quotable!) writings and loving observations of nature ("Autumnal Tints," "Wild Apples," "Huckleberries"). A companion volume, edited by Robert F. Sayre, contains Thoreau's four longest publications ("A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," "The Maine Woods," "Cape Cod" and, of course, "Walden") - thus omitting from the Library of America series only his extensive journals and the posthumously published "Faith in a Seed," a collection of four manuscripts left partially unfinished at Thoreau's death in 1862 and published for the first time in the late 1990s, to much fanfare among Thoreauvians the world over.

Introspective to a fault, the man who once built a cabin on Walden Pond and for over two years lived the life of a hermit, was also a keen observer; of nature as much as of the world surrounding him. The shallowness and greed he saw in so-called "civil" society filled him with skepticism ("intellectual and moral suicide," he scoffed in "Life Without Principle") - and with the tireless need to encourage free thinking and personal independence. "I wish to speak a word for Nature," he thus opened his essay on "Walking," and explained that he sought to make a point in favor of "absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society." And he went on to mourn the fact that few people were truly able to walk and travel freely, to leave behind the social bounds that tied them down, and to open up to nature's beauty. This, of course, echoed his famous statements in "Walden" that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation;" that however, as he had learned by his "experiment" on Walden Pond, "if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." And this was the same spirit who, staunchly opposed to both slavery and to the Mexican War, would rather spend a night in jail than pay his taxes, and who summed up his posture in "Civil Disobedience" by saying that "I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right" - a statement echoed roughly a hundred years later when Mahatma Gandhi told an English court that he believed that "non-cooperation with evil is a duty and British rule of India is evil," and also resonating through the publications of many an American civil rights leader, first and foremost Martin Luther King Jr.

While I had read much of Thoreau's work already before I discovered the Library of America collections, I am extremely pleased to see the majority of his body of work reunited in two volumes in this dignified series. For one thing, while there are innumerable compilations containing "Walden" and some of his other better-known works, it is still difficult to get a hold of Thoreau's lesser known essays and poems. Moreover, though, and more importantly, reading his works in the context provided by this collection makes for much greater insight into the man's personality, and his philosophy as a whole. While a biography certainly adds perspective, nothing surpasses the experience of reading Thoreau's works in context - and in the context of the works of other Transcendentalists, first and foremost Emerson. This is a true literary treasure: to behold, cherish and read again and again.

Also recommended:
Henry David Thoreau : A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden; Or, Life in the Woods / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod (Library of America)
Essays and Lectures: Nature: Addresses and Lectures / Essays: First and Second Series / Representative Men / English Traits / The Conduct of Life (Library of America)

This is a very fine collection of Essays and Poems but a bit pricey. I have to think that Thoreau would not have approved. Go to the library and paw through some of the essays
to see if you want the ones that you cannot get through another
collection. Frequently "Walking" or "Civil Disobedience" or
"Life Without Principle" are added to small volumes of Walden.
I, of course, shelled out the cash and bought it, but I
sometimes have second thoughts. The paper is quite thin and
I have doubts about it's durablity. If you intend to read this
work several times while underlining and making notes, I would look aroung before buying this specific volume. If you merely want a presentable copy to sit on the shelves and only occasionally consulted, but otherwise dormant-than this is for you.
As a side note, Thoreau demonstrates that some mediums are
better for others. Although a master prose essay writer( I see
"Walden" a a collection of discrete, connected essays) his
poetry isn't so great. This is not uncommon, although a great
prose-poet, Nietzsche's straight poetry is very weak.
Essentially, the material inside this volume is worth your
money. This volume itself may not satisfy your needs though.
Go to a university library, read through the essays, and decide
how important ownership is for you. Thoreau would have approved
of such an investigation.

Reading Alice Walker reviews here on Amazon is highly annoying. Either they praise her to the skies, scouring any who react with an analytical response, or they attack her for the racial simplicities that some see as marring her work (those who get annoyed by her "white folk have no rhythm" trope). Both extremes have not been very useful for promoting *my* greater understanding of her work--I see the talent seething, squirming in her--but through many books, there were twists in her choices that alienated her talent to me.

Simply put, this book that convinced me Alice is a Talent with a capital "T". She starts with a lovely preface, "In keeping faith with Poetry's honest help to me, I have not deleted or changed--beyond a word or two--anything I have written, though greatly tempted at times to do so. The young self, the naive promiscuous self, appear doubly vulnerable now, in light of my unexpected bonus of years, and the experience they have brought me. I embrace them all, as Poetry embraced me..." From there, she follows with some beautiful, beautiful poetry, speaking to the struggle to develop and improve as an artist.

There are mis-steps, irritations. "There are no tigers/in Africa!/You say./Frowning./Yes. I say./Smiling./But they are/very beautiful." doesn't do much for me. I prefer my evocations of Africa without this almost Disney-esque gloss of "all cool primitive things we'll embrace as African."

Cumulatively, however--the poems are terrific. It's not often that I read through an entire volume of poetry without putting it down. Read this book for all its warts and missteps--and glory in it for its terrific human achievement.

I love the structure of her poems. She writes for those who have forgotten how things used to be with African American life and struggles. My favorite section in the book is from "Revolutionary Petunias" and "Willie Lee." Walker has been an inspiration for me in writing poetry. I love her use of imagery in her free verse. It was commented that Walker relies too much on her relationships in her personal friendships in her writing. But I disagree. I propose that no one should read her poetry without reading her autobiography of her past. Most poets will create an illusion of situations, but Walker alludes to her past and speaks the truth to us all. I hope she sees this because I've always wanted to talk with her and ask her about the things I have written, but I am in the process of challenging myself to want the reader to feel something in a meter that they can feel but not see. Then THATS incredible. Nice work Ms. Walker

Startled to find so many poems that resonated in my own life, I copied many down and posted them around by room. Each provides a meditation on a different theme, from death to distraction, affairs of the heart to hunger and the nagging, geographic pull to home. When I give my speech at graduation next week, it will end with "The Nature Of This Flower Is To Bloom," thanks to Alice Walker.

This is a wonderful rendition of Lear's poem. Knight's artwork is absolutely splendid, with glorious detail that will delight children and adults over and over again. I've been reading this book for ten years to my children, and I still linger over the drawings.

A must have.

If you're a fan of Hilary Knight's artwork (and if you're not, you ought to be), you will definitely want this book. Those who are only familiar with Knight's wonderful pen and ink drawings for Eloise and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle will be amazed at the beauty of his full color illustrations. This book is good enough for either your child's/nephew's/niece's bookshelf, or (in my case) your own. The illustrations of a young boy and girl slowly becoming part of the tale are beautifully rendered. I am glad to see so many Knight books on the market again, and hope that i will get to see some more.

I am not a huge fan of old "nursery rhyme" type poetry, but this book caught my eye and my 3 yr old boys and I love it! The illustrations are simply amazing as each page unfolds from 2 children visiting an eccentric, storytelling neighbor to the children becoming the owl and pussycat. My boys immediately noticed the firepole in the man's house among other curiosities. As the children enjoy a snack and the man reads the poem, the floor turns to water and the window seat to a pea green boat. The bespeckled little boy becomes an owl and girl becomes a cat. The poem is read a second time with them as the main characters and the illustrations cleary 'telling' the story. Just as fluidly, the children return to human form and their mothers call them for dinner as the poem winds down. This book would certainly be a wonderful addition to a classic nursery rhymes collection.

These other reviewers say it more eloquently. But I agree. I read an interview with Tory Dent in which she spoke of the line, the exercise of trying out different lengths of line. Her "Whitman-length" line developed into a great vehicle for her own intelligent, cinematic-scope passion. The words seem crammed onto the page, and yet, as with Anne Carson's Glass Essay, you find yourself fifteen pages along, wondering at the richness, and the breadth of expression and quite without any sense of harsh density.

Tory Dent is one of the great poets of America. She has continued a new and dazzling poetry of dissent, which combines critical and lyrical and political elements. Like a true "performance artist," like Ann Hamilton, her poetry activates a complex narrative with historical reverberations. Her long poem on her "Quarantine" shows the heartbreaking honesty and anger of this wonderful poet. Each of her poems is as electrifying as a sculpture of abjection by Kiki Smith, whose wild talent most resembles Dent's We see in these poems the body of woman presented in all abjection and also as a triumph above fragility. In my lifetime, I have never seen such a startling poetry of ultimacy and its contents. It is a poetry to be placewd next to the architecrtural masques of the late John Hejduk, who had a like intensity and utter seriousness. The poetry of our time is too often whimsical, false and cheap, and made for consumption. Dent's poetry, like the best of Anna Swir the Polish baroque poet, is a revelation for her generation. It does not use confession unwisely; it does not refuse to name the poignant wounds, betrayals and loyalties. This is a poet who demands our truest attention and deserves it. I recommend her work without reservations.

This is a tremendous book of poetry that's already won one major prize and I read in the New York Times last week that it is nominated for the upcoming National Critics Circle Award. I have to admit I was completely stunned by it and think very, very highly of this book. More than any other poet that comes out of the "New York School" started by Frank O'Hara and continued by all sorts of interesting writers like John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach and so forth, this is far and away the most powerful writer of the bunch. In large part this is because of her subject matter: focused on life and death issues rather than somewhat cosmetic aesthetic concerns, and with a much greater emotional range that what I've seen come out of experimental American poets before. Wow! The book is like wandering around in a huge, incredibly graphic and detailed dream, and its imagery is absolutely wonderful. I would recommend it highly to anyone interested at all in contemporary poetry. All best to Tory Dent, wherever you are!

The poems in Birkbeck's book are enchanting; they are like colourful little fables, sometimes bitingly caustic, sometimes playfully goofy. These poems, most of them short and sparing in words, are the literary equivalent of hieroglyphs. They seem to cover a lot of territory in brief patches. It is very hard to determine this poet's voice, however-- is it sad, mad or bad? or maybe it's all three, seperately or ensemble. Birkbeck is both a lost and a found soul. Read on!

Shortly after John Birkbeck came out with "Longitudes," he has set out another collection of poems titled "Homeless at Home." Birkbeck seems to be picking up speed and regailing the literary world with still more of his grim but fanciful but exhillarating poems, which are short but succinct. In fact, it seems that a lot of them are really stanzas of one long poem. He seems to be making fun of the Passing Parade, and at others, prancing along at the head of it. A gripping read, this book, and must be read!

John Birkbeck reminds me of the old addage that has it, "Show me a funny man and I'll show you an angry one." Birkbeck's poetry seems to have a lot of rage beneath the surface, yet without malice. It is a rage to see life as it is and as it could be. I once met Birkbeck at a conference, and had a chance to talk to him over dinner. He is one of the funniest people I've ever met, even when speaking of horrific things. The poems in "Homeless At Home" remind me much of that memorable dinner so many years ago. I highly recommend this latest work of John Birkbeck.

This was a textbook I had in AP English in high school twenty-something years ago, and it is the only high school textbook of which I remember the title-- it was that memorable. A Great book. This textbook both defined and expanded the world of poetry for me, and I hope to again get a copy of it. Until I can find it again somewhere, I will have to be content with with some of the samples of poetry that I can still remember from outstanding book.

John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean? is an intriguing, unorthodox, and surprisingly effective introduction to poetry. He argues that the question: "What Does a Poem Mean?" is too often a self-destroying approach that results in paraphrasing and misses the point of poetry. A poem is to be experienced, not simply interpreted. Unlike prose, a poem is primarily a performance.

How does a poem build itself into a form out of images, ideas, and rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? John Ciardi's remarkable textbook answers these questions, makes enjoyable reading, and is a five star introduction to poetry.

This text, published by Houghton Mifflin, was adopted by many colleges in the 1960s and 1970s. Inexpensive, used, soft cover copies are still fairly easy to find.

The eight chapters are titled How Does a Poem Mean?, A Burble Through the Tulgey Wood, By Rippling Pools, The Words of Poetry, The Sympathetic Contract, The Image and the Poem, The Poem in Motion, and The Poem in Countermotion.

I encountered many familiar poems as well as others new to me. Among the latter, I list several to illustrate the wide range of Ciardi's selections (and to remind me to return to these poets): The Listeners (Walter De la Mare), Mr. Flood's Party (Edwin Arlington Robinson), The Death of a Hired Hand (Robert Frost), Burning Love Letters (Howard Moss), Snake (D. H. Lawrence), Blue Girls (John Crowe Ransom), Medusa (Louise Bogan), A Subterranean City (Thomas Lovell Beddoes), and What the Sonnet Is (Eugene Lee Hamilton).

Also, I especially enjoyed three closely related poems: Departmental (Frost), Heaven (Rupert Brooke), and A Deep Discussion (Richard Moore).

Like most collections of poetry, How Does a Poem Mean? is best enjoyed if read in a leisurely fashion over several months. The overall time commitment may be substantial, but John Ciardi's fascinating text will reward your efforts. Take your time. Enjoy yourself. Remember, poetry is to be experienced, not simply analyzed. Cheers.

This book was a text book for me as I wandered, wonderingly, into the world of freshman college English Lit. in 1960. It has made th cut on all of the 27 "moves to new digs" that I have made since then. It is now like an old friend--treasured, respected, loved. I am sorry it is out of print because my copy is held together with tape and cannot last too much longer. It is written with such an obvious love for the subject matter (the poem) that one is caught up in that love and swept along with it. Yet, the writing is simple, clear, and constructive. It is an introduction to poetry for an adult of any age. For me, it was, and is--priceless.