Poems Books

I first picked up this book in my local library when I was in high school at the tail-end of the 1980s. It totally changed my life. I knew I was a poet/writer from an early age, but reading Rupert Brooke's work really inspired me to dig deeper within myself and be a better writer. With the exception of Dylan Thomas and William Blake, Brooke was the one writer I admired above all others. I have carried this book around with me for the past13 years, and whenever I need inspiration I read his poems. Although I don't find all of them to my taste, there are some that stand out above all others, most notably "The Call", "The Voice", "Success" and "Ambarvalia" - some of these are incredible mystic poems that inspired a lot of my simliar work. I would advise anyone interested in the war era poets, or just darn good poetry, to look this one up. It's awesome.

This book changed my life. Brooke is one of the most gifted writers I have ever read, not to mention my favorite. You will be hard pressed to find anything closer to eloquent, raw emotion on paper. "Love," "Jealousy," and "Success" are particularly notable.

I happened upon the poetry of Rupert Brooke in an old old (truly ancient) used bookstore in a serene corner of Vancouver Island... something about this aged, sepia-colored, hardcover beauty of a book made me feel it had been abandoned by someone else and left there especially for me to find. The rest of the day I was on the beach with it, and each new page further convinced me that I had stumbled upon greatness. Each phrase carried a thoughtful hush along with it, and I felt that to breathe was an interruption. Time and time again I have been brought back to the poetry of Brooke, and this collection has become one of my treasures. Someone abandoned it for me to find, and yet it has become something I would run back into a burning house to retrieve.

These are brief poems about love and longing, doubts, serenity, nature and goodness, frivolity, victory and jealousy, and stirring wartime sonnets that express a noble idealism in the face of death. These latter are grouped under the author's title of "1914" and are his most well-known series, perhaps not only because of their perfection, but also because of their prophetic nature. Brooke lived a brief but eventful life (1887-1915). With the outbreak of World War I he was commissioned in England's Royal Navy, and took part in a disastrous expedition at Antwerp which ended in retreat. At the age of 27, he died from blood-poisoning on board a French hospital ship off the coast of Skyros, Greece. He was buried at night, by torchlight, in an olive grove about a mile inland. Reportedly, if you go there you will find a little wooden cross with just his name and the date of his birth and his death marked on it in black. The fifth poem (entitled The Soldier) in Brooke's sonnet sequence begins... "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England."

There's no mistaking a Kenneth Rexroth poem -- intelligence, erudition, intensity, and precise beauty are always present. These qualities are demonstrated to magnificent effect in this collection of love poems ... but forget about any vapid associations the phrase "love poems" might have, because these pages are a contained universe of life & emotion. This is adult work in the best sense of the word, intended for a thoughtful & passionate audience.

All of Rexroth's learning is in these lines, but he never flaunts it or calls attention to it. No, it's simply there, like the grain in a fine piece of carved wood. The tone is both observant and intensely engaged, reminiscent of the Chinese & Japanese poets he loved & translated so superbly. Yet it's always his own distinctive voice we hear, never just a pale imitation of those other poets. These are poems about nature, about love, sexuality, the modern world, literature, spirituality -- all woven together into an intricate golden braid, apparently without any effort.

If you're looking for "nice," obvious greeting card verse, you'll have to look elsewhere. But if you want poetry that's as rich & complex as love itself, then you'll find it in this volume -- most highly recommended!

Rexroth's poems are expansive, lucid, and human. His is a great heart, a great mind, and a consummate poetic talent. These are poems for the ages and the fact that they are in print 20 years after his death attests to that fact.

Rexroth's relationships with women were equal parts passion and turmoil. He was married four times. In addition, both during and between marriages he indulged in numerous affairs. Interestingly, his love poetry stands in stark contrast to the rather painful bent of his personal romantic life. "Sacramental Acts" culls the best of Rexroth's love poetry from his entire career. The result is an ode to a romantic ideal. Given the accessible style of Rexroth's love poetry, this title makes a wonderful library addition for even the most casual poetry fan. On a more scholarly plane, Rexroth viewed human awareness and interaction as threefold concetric circles. At the center was the individual. The next ring was the "beloved". Outermost was society et al. "Sacramental Acts" is the heart and voice of the second ring.

Rachel Wetzsteon never disappoints. She has no bottom, no horizon, and no stellar limit. I always succumb to her enticing poetry. She makes time stop at every reading. One can only hope for many more volumes.

Sakura Park showcases Rachel Wetzsteon's poetic style and talent as she invites the reader to share in an emotional wealth of romantic insights with respect to the meaning of love, life, truth and beauty. Pemberley: The park was very large. We drove/for some time through a beautiful wood/until the wood ceased, and the house came into view./Inside were miniatures, small faces/we gawked at until a housekeeper showed us/the maste's finer portrait in an upper room./I dredged up a shaming moment:/you asked me a question, then ducked as I spewed/an idiot's vitriol, blindness disguised as rage./The house stood well on rising ground, and beneath its slopes the thirsty couples/held their glasses high at Cafe Can't Wait./ I spent time at its flimsy tables/but then I walked under trees whose leaves/exhaled gusty stories of good deeds;/I learned empty houses are excellent teachers;/I sent you away and felt you grow/tremendous sin your absence. Ask me again.

I've been waiting for this collection to come out for some time based on the strength of pieces like "Love and Work" first featured in The New Yorker about five years ago and "On Leaving The Bachelorette Lunch" from Poetry a couple of years back. If you're reading this buyer's review then you're probably already aware of Wetzsteon's formal adroitness. She's a votary of Auden and she's inherited some of her master's huge empathy, self deprecation and erudition. But unlike, say, the later work of Auden, she wears her learning as lightly as a summmer dress(the seasons are a theme she goes back to again and again in these gorgeous urban pastorals). More than any poems I know, this collection depicts a negotiation between the need for privacy (creative space?) and the need for intimacy. The tension makes for first-rate lyric drama. Sometimes Sakura Park reads like Sex and The City for the intellectually adventurous, heck, the intellectually uninhibited. It's very much a hypereducated thirty something's sentimental education. There are references to Wittgenstein and Weil which are simultaneously funny, respectful and seamlessly integrated into their respective poems. Many pieces smack of seriousness and wit:

"There is an inner motor known as lust
that makes a man of learning walk a mile
to gratify his raging senses, while
the woman he can talk to gathers dust.

A chilling vision of the years ahead
invades my thoughts, and widens like a stain:
a barren dance card and a teeming brain,
a crowded bookcase and an empty bed. from "Love and Work"

These poems are a perpetual coming to terms that we're lucky to eavesdrop on. Like good movies? I don't know of any poet who has been able to internalize the sensibility of the Sturges/Hawks/Cukor screwball comedienne like Wetzsteon has. Pauline Kael would be proud. If I have one quibble with the persona behind most of the poems, it's the x factor of social class. The poems depict the universe of The Upper West Side aesthete with refulgent beauty. In fact, the poet uses the phrase "my city" in different pieces. One wishes the poet/flaneuse would train her gaze on some of the meaner streets Baudelaire or , god help us, Eliot evoke. That being said, this is her best book yet. "Evening News", "Dachsund" "But For The Grace" and "Love and Work" are great poems. You will find yourself going back to these and works just as sprightly for their playfulness and wisdom.

This is one of my favorite books from childhood. The poems in it are so witty and gross and totally entertaining for adults and kids alike.

This slim volume contains fifteen scary stories told in free verse. Each poem is accompanied by a unique illustration that perfectly matches the tone of the tale. These story/blank verse poems are fun to read aloud to a group with the caveat that the more intense offerings might actually frighten sensitive and youngest members of a gathering. Other selections are more pure comedy. A great collection for grades four and up!

This collection of scary poems includes poems about a dark, dark cave with a giant troll waiting to swallow any visitors, a bone-less creature that slides its agile body through keyholes and under doors to feast on the bones of children who stay up too long in the middle of the night, a carnivorous white fog that smothers anyone who comes near it, a horrifying breakfast scene where your parents have their bodily features removed and replaced, a particularily haunting tale that shows of a careless kid who walks in acid rain and has his body slowly dissolved into tiny bits, a shocking tale in which a swarm of mosquitoes suck the blood out of a spoiled girl who would scream at her parents, a poem about a many-legged creature under you stairs that will devour and torture anyone who wakes up in the night for a snack, and other poems that will definitely chill your child to the bone. (Need I say any more?)

If you are considering buying this great book, make sure that your child is mature enough to handle the severity of this book. Your kid could have reoccuring nightmares (or worse) if he/she comes across any of these poems...

Robert Hass called this "one of the best books of poetry I've read in the last year or so." I agree. I can't say I always understand where Jon Davis is taking me in these poems, but I can say I'm enjoying and being challenged by the ride. I'm especially intrigued by the long sequence of poems the poet calls "The Ochre World." Here the poems work by juxtaposition and implication, each line sparking off the others, each section adding and enlarging the flame that eventually--how?--gives off enough light to illuminate the cave we're in at the poem's close. I don't know of another poet who tightropes along the edge of incoherence so beautifully. The sequence is unlike anything I've read, yet is somehow welcoming in its difficulties. On second thought, I'll go further than Robert Hass: This is the best book of poetry I've read since Hass's own Human Wishes.

Jon Davis was recently a recipient of a Lannan Foundation Award for his work in poetry. It couldn't have gone to a better person, having known and worked with Jon in Santa Fe, NM. However, without a biased personal relationship, this book is phenomenal. Whether you're an experienced reader of poetry or just looking to make your way into this form of reading, Jon's work is accessible on many levels, and will move and impress you, as it has so many others.

In the spring 2001 issue of "Rain Taxi," esteemed novelist David Foster Wallace not only praised this book to the skies, but even paid for an ad for the book in the same issue--an act probably unprecedented in book-reviewing history. In his review, Wallace said Davis's prose poems are "off-the-charts terrific."

Lou Lipsitz has a wonderful gift for transforming deeply-felt emotions into colorful imagery, often profound and sometimes humorous. His work is accessible in that I feel that shock of recognition that comes whenever I see my own deep feelings captured by another, but also quite unique and surprising--he takes those feelings to places I have never been...

...

Seeking the Hook by Lou Lipsitz moved me. It is a very personal kind of poetry, accessible and beautifully written. I was surprised by how much I liked it.

This collection of poems is refreshing and speaks to a wide range of human emotions. You'll find yourself laughing at "The Blackberry Authorities," wincing at "Seeking the Hook" and crying at "Separation." Lipsitz's poetic descriptions of growing up in Brooklyn are humorous and heartwarming. This is my favorite collection of poetry. And best of all, I CAN UNDERSTAND IT :-) (How refreshing!) I just found out it is available through the Duke University Press.

Judith Taylor is a fabulist of those fictions we weave as breathing rooms for our need. Whatever bloody business reality proffers, Judith Taylor negotiates her terrain with the deft aplomb of an Ambassador Albright, her poetic renderings diplomatically selective. "We are all like Scheherazade's husband," one might hear Taylor echoing E.M. Forster, knowing all too well that Scheherazade's husband was a bum. You'll not find Taylor teetering at the top of life's staircase like some melodramatic Crawford, "noiring into memoir." This tale-teller knows that transformation has its power, desirous as we are to be abducted and lifted out of the mundane. Waylaid into this castle of wonders, you're apt to encounter an eclectic gathering of ghosts: nuns, ballerinas, Danny Kaye, Mexican mummies, Arthur Dimmesdale, Japanese courtesans, even an Orpheus irreverently as "Orph." Taylor's offhand delivery belies her technical mastery, able as she is to combine dizzying shifts of diction with riffs of sheer gorgeousness. These poems ride on their own melting, as Frost said poetry must. Fond as I am of Curios, Taylor's stunning debut volume, I find myself even more taken with the sophistication and the sinuous unfolding of the new longer poems contained here in Selected Dreams from the Animal Kingdom, "Tale," "Practicing," "How Am I Driving?" among my favorites. Like an ex-Le Mans driver making her way through the intricate weave of Parisian streets, Taylor takes you, dear reader, circuitously but swiftly by the most interesting route, and deposits you, before you quite know that you've arrived, at your destination, a little wiser for the ride. Can one really call it "your" destination? One can hardly say, for the ingenious Taylor is always-breathtakingly, enchantingly-one step ahead.

Judith Taylor's work never fails to provoke a doubletake. Her unique voice wends through these poems with a quiet authority, juxtaposed against a pervasive sense of doubt and wonder at her surroundings and circumstances. While so much of modern poetry searches for a fresh image, Taylor seems to have found and employed most of them here. The work is both fun and illuminating. The book's "Mood Sonnets" provide sentence after sentence of the "concrete surreal," each line related to the next by music and the deep suspicion that we are all, somehow, connected. Taylor's ability to confront the self, with all its flaws and charms, lets her get away with anything and everything.

Judith Taylor's poems creep up on you. You read them as you might listen to a dream retold, hearing at first only the conversational tone, the charm, gradually seized by the imagery. Imagine that--gradually seized, an event that could only take place in a dream, or in a book. Her poems are full of knowledge worn easily, experience held lightly; they give you more than you expected, and never give away too much. Her love poems, written in response to Japanese medieval and 17th century literature, are especially beautiful, and to this reader, especially pertinent. Her mood sonnets (14 line poems, each line a complete sentence) are reminiscent of her first book, Curios, but are more playful, relaxed and diverse in tone.

The poetry of John Wieners is, I must say, one of my most interesting finds I have made. Wieners explored with perfect accuracy the pains and tribulations life had gift wrapped for him. Poet of minor fame (or rather, of none), his writing imagery and mental frame have created a prose of it's own. And the beauty to start off with his early - in which some are a tad weak, but talent surfaces - work to his later frame of mind and prose, in which, his prose trancends among the greats, not only of his era...but definately of a wider spectrum. Wieners is a sure bet and it's truly a shame that his name hasn't surfaced much during his living presence...and not of yet after his death. "...Cool breezes on my forehead / cool liquors down my throat / so soon if in years to come / someone hears a single note.".

In 1989 I had the opportunity to listen to John Weiners read and discuss his poetry. If discuss is the right word. By then Mr. Weiners mental state had pretty well deterierated to a point that he made little sense. But his poetry did. From his battles with drugs, his sexuality and religion, Mr. Weiners poetry spoke volumes about him and his life. I am not a poetry fan, but somehow someway his poetry spoke to me. His use of the language and his passion will touch and engage even a non poetry fan.

John Wieners' the authentic thing,surpassing all art-historic poetic requirement he's an insider from that ruthlessly over-publicized "BEAT" scene,"famous among the famous" if you will...He's an insider in the sense that he occupies the inside of an anonymous hotel like a religous retreat, inside his own sympathetic head where alls recorded in a private diarie, inside a lyrical quest for the heartbroken line eradicating everything...he's in the business of healing words: a modern-day Rilke with the gorgeous lyrical gift imparted on every page. One imagines his words coming from sitting on the edge of the bed like sitting at the edge of the world waiting for it all to painlessly end with the formality of an unacknowledged graceful bow. John Wieners knows the-HERO-IN-side-of-us-all; having suffered drugs:the divorce from societal companionship, the physicality of that narcotic hell,all for that invioable annihilating peace becoming of an unattainable suicide where forgivness reigns supreme. He knows the tortured homosexual shared-secret hell of keeping the forbidden joy hidden...as well as the erotic's supremacy of form and all's deposited in his pages in exquisite scripture. Reading his poems is comparable to getting high in a public restroom: consider it an indulgence in secret vice your closest friends can only guess at by the disturbed glint & gloss over your eyes. Going out in public is never the same after reading him, nor will the beat generation ever be the same for you again once you've found his work; a wholly unimaginable dimension of beatitude poetics will open your eyes, mind and legs to a vast new range of experience previously ignored by public and scholars alike. I do not consider it a startling sin he's un-recognized, un-acknowledged, and un-appreaciated, if anything it has merely made him stronger and deemed all his admirer's: initiates, and all those poets schooled by him: adepts. One more thing, besides the obvious study of evil he has accomplished in his verses lies all earthly and otherwordly heavens' astounding psalms. If you do not already become ecstatic when under the influence of poetry this will surely make you drunk, and if it's your first time, welcome;and if you don't heed the warnings of the fanatic,then for posterity's sake at least let me say : There is a hero-in-side-of-us-all...

Yes, indeed. CK Williams' poem about the red wheel barrow is really something, especially since there's more to the wheel barrow than meets the eye--something about the origins of the word and how he/she breaks the stanzas. In this poetry class I took I heard that she/he used to be a doctor. I wonder if that has something to do with how he saw the contrast with the white chickens.

C.K. Williams poetry often mimics the thought process, reasoning its way to significance. In his early poems, sections or stanzas divide this process. Later, as he develops his writing, the lines grow. The amount of thought and details expand As Sherod Santos describes in his essay A Solving Emptiness, "The breathless insistence of Williams's line give ordinary moments a stupefying psychological power, an Orphic music. With a microscopic eye that notch by notch closes in on its subjects, Williams's microscopic eye allows us to experience his experiences almost as if they are our own. His poems have a strong sense of place, with large amounts of description and images to further this effect. My favorite poem is "Tar", but I enjoy many of his other poems such as "A Day for Anne Frank", "The Beginning of April", "The Sanctity." C.K. Williams is a poet that should not be overlooked by anyone interested in great poetry.

If you want to feel less alone in the real world of honest feelings, if you want to get in touch with true feelings, if you want to understand your emotions and explore your guilt and really dig deeper than sentiment--C.K. Williams is the poet for you. His voice is more original and his psychological depth deeper than most contemporary poets. He makes you feel less alone with your inner life. There is no sentimental frosting here. This is accessible and original poetry with a crafty use of language, a flowing free verse. I've spent my life reading poetry, and I find this poet thoroughly satisfying. Spend an evening or a morning or both with his SELECTED POEMS and you will be moved and amazed at the original angles he takes on truth and human feelings and relationships. This is a poet of psychological, philiosphical realization--a thinker who really probes the inner life with grace of expression. Daniela Gioseffi, American Book Award winning author, poet/critic/novelist.

I bought it for one poem: "Love Song". It is the best poem about love and lust that I have ever read.

Published in 1987, this book contains page-length poems selected by the author. You don't read these poems to get a story line, but rather a feeling of place. With Ammons its the precise observation of nature "Bees stopped on the rock", or a "Snow log". There are also mirrors of the self, "of a life that did become" in the poem Easter morning. In some ways, he is a modern Transcendentalist, looking at nature, observing carefully, and looking even deeper. I recommend this book to anyone, and its a good introduction to Ammons.

Published in 1987, this book contains page-length poems selected by the author. You don't read these poems to get a story line, but rather a feeling of place. With Ammons its the precise observation of nature "Bees stopped on the rock", or a "Snow log". There are also mirrors of the self, "of a life that did become" in the poem Easter morning. In some ways, he is a modern Transcendentalist, looking at nature, observing carefully, and looking even deeper. I recommend this book to anyone, and its a good introduction to Ammons.