Poetry Books

This fantastic collection of poems explains the structure for many poetic forms, providing examples of each. My fourth grader read it through and found it fascinating and inspiring. She is now writing her own poetry. I also found the book educational and interesting. A superb book.

This book was a lot of fun to read to my students and really helped conjure up some creativity in them!

I bought this book for the children's section of my library. My niece loves it! It has sparked her interest in poetry so much that she is not only writing her own using the rules taught in the book for each form but she is also seeking out forms not included in the book! She has discovered that Tyger Tyger by William Blake is her favorite poem. I could not be more pleased with this book.

Every year Poetry Month comes along and every year there are children's librarians like myself who shudder at its approach. Poetry. It's not something that every person in the world is going to appreciate right off the bat. So, if you're like myself, you get out a bunch of poetry books, put them in an area labeled "POETRY MONTH SELECTIONS" and then desperately search the internet for further poetry-related activities you can hold in your branch. This year I decided I'd try to do some poetry with the homeschooler bookgroup I run. What I really wanted was to show the kids lots of books with different kinds of poetic styles in them. A collection of poetic forms, if you will. I couldn't find anything perfect, however, so I just chalked it up to there being too few useful poetry books for kids in this world. Then I attended the Children's Book Committee annual breakfast at the Bank Street College of Education. And the winner of the 2005 Claudia Lewis Award, as it happened, was "A Kick In the Head", as selected by Paul B. Janeczko. I was curious so I picked it up. And right then and there it hit me that THIS was the book I'd been so desperately searching for all this time. It's a truly interesting collection of poetic forms done in such a way that kids will not only understand them, but want to write some of their own. After I recovered from the shock I returned to my library and sure enough, lo and behold, there was the book sitting perkily on my shelf where it had always been. So parents, educators, and librarians, heed my warning. Discover "A Kick In the Head" for your own Poetry Months before it's too late. Don't make the same mistake I did.

The book contains twenty-nine different poetic forms. Everything from your basic haikus and limericks to triolets, aubades, and pantoums. There are blues poems and clerihews, and even the rare riddle poem or two. Janeczko has culled the most amusing and child-friendly versions of these forms possible, and it works. For example, take the villanelle. You might not think it lends itself naturally to a child's reading, but then you see how cleverly Joan Bransfield Graham has created, "Is There a Villain In Your Villanelle?". And into this lively jumble we throw Chris Raschka's brightly colored mixed-media extravaganza. The result is a high-energy introduction to poetry in all its wild and wooly forms. A lovely amalgamation to say the least.

None of this is to say that there wasn't an odd choice or two. For the "found poem", Janeczko reprints Georgia Heard's, "The Paper Trail". The poem is a beautiful list of different kinds of writing, and it soon becomes clear that these are the scraps of paper and floated to the ground when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. No mention of 9/11 is ever made, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to get the St. Paul's Cathedral reference. Fans of that old Cat Stevens song, "Morning Has Broken", will see it listed under the "aubade" section. And I, for one, had no idea that poem/song was written originally by classic children's author Eleanor Farjeon. Go figure.

I'm not normally a Raschka fan, by the way. Something about his images, I find off-putting. But I did enjoy a lot of what the artist decided to do here. For the "senryu" poem, for example, he was able to construct a month old cheese sandwich using only paper fibers of various orange, yellow, green (bleck!), and cream-colored shades. And if you think he had an easy job of this book then YOU try making an illustration for Shakespeare's "Sonnet Number Twelve". Even worse, make a picture for a poem imitating "Sonnet Number Twelve". It's doubly hard. So a tip of the hat to Raschka's efforts.

Now people are going to wonder what ages to hand this book to. I say, all. Obviously some of the poems, like the sonnets, aren't going to charm very small ones. But kids who like silly limericks or tankas that begin with words like, "Fish guts" will find their favorites in this selection. As for older kids, this book is useful well into high school. At that point the students will start appreciating the difficulty behind some of the more elaborate poems. A lovely addition to every library and I dare say a necessary one. No poetry section is complete without this book.

This book is a wonderful tool if you are teaching poetry. It describes many different types of poetry with an example and a simple explanation. Very colorful pictures.

Wise takes convention by the neck and wrings it until it squawks out confessions that, if they are not exactly true, sound true enough to point into the dank corner of the subconscious where truth lurks. Though she does not announce herself as an experimental poet (apart from a note on the writing of "Autobiography", one of the most breathtaking pieces here - all the more so for its extraordinarily simple and rigorous method of composition), Wise stands shoulder to shoulder with the weirdest and riskiest. Take "Was heisst Rechtfertigung? Bewältigung der Vergangenheit", where she mis-hears each German sentence in uncanny formulations: "Was his right to finger good? / ... / Was history just a flirty theme song? / ... / Bore under verb's ache and hit. / ... / Be welted damage, a vague, anguished heart." Or in "Advice" and "More Advice", where a welter of just that (culled from dictators and teachers alike) forms a self-destructing authoritarian mask that effectively inverts the dramatic monologue.

Wise also sneaks the autobiographical in the back door, heavily cloaked in similar language play and semantic instability, such as in "Planted Document", where all the "i"s and "e"s have been removed. Self-construction, especially of a verbal kind, turns to a fistful of sand in her hands: "Basically, I was subletting a very unlisted condition" ("I Was Very Prolific"); "I could be in the dark without my being out there" ("What I Wanted To Know Was Through"). Less tour de force than tanz de force, Wise tiptoes the line of between - the uncertain mood of the subjunctive - deftly and seemingly artlessly. Due to the nature of an experimental poetics (or a method-based one) - not that Wise cleaves exclusively to one - there will always be works that diminish somewhat in their effect when placed beside such thrilling accomplishments as "Lunchtime in the Kingdom of the Subjunctive", but even Wise's lesser works provide their little bolts of jouissance. A first book to emulate and treasure.

The Kingdom of the Subjunctive distinguishes itself as a series of highly successful linguistic and formal experiments most active among the bruised inheritances of history. Narratives fly kamikaze through the rooms of an old house, spiral down the drain and travel underground through sewers before they rise back up to the surface of a neighborhood field turned parking lot. "On this trip, it is already too late: there's no avoiding/ the highway ahead, a one-way highway in a country/ of like-minded highways. There's nothing else to do/ but accelerate." While many of the poems in the book operate in the linguistic space of collage (only a few stepping outside narrative boundaries), Wise's narratives (though often surreal) generally maintain a sense of coherence, thus effecting a strong sense of urban and domestic confusion while still staying close to the reader. In "50 Years in the Career of an Aspiring Thug" (a prose poem in numbered sections), she chronicles the mundane progression of a life whose early antics include tying a girl to railroad tracks and pledging in a diary to "conquer," but whose later moments amount to a monotonous half-conscious cubical existence: "22. Wrote neat columns. 23. Of numbers. 24. Added with precision. 25. Punched. 26. The. 27. Clock. 28. The. 29. Clock. 30. The. 31. Clock."

Suzanne Wise shows her comfort with unrhymed couplets, but when she strays from this form, she does it with style. "A Girl's Life: in the Photo Album" consists of a four-lined poem in only 23 words with ample space allotted between the captions of what we realize must be missing photos meant to be imagined back into being. When Wise exposes her world's lacunae, it is always accompanied by a gesture toward amelioration and an invitation to the reader to participate in her project of reconciliation.

Suzanne Wise shoots from the hip. She's smart, angry, passionate, ardent, neurotic and inventive, and she feels responsibility to both sides of history. She writes about Germany, she writes about a trip to rediscover her past, but not very clearly, she blurs things up intentionally, blurs up the biography, smears it up, like the girl in Planted Document, so that we can see multi meanings and various reflections in the mixed up version of things. But she is suspicious of the I, illustrating instead a whole community of Is (Autobiography), she's not satisfied with exploring the attic, she showers all over "the parlor... the chandelier's candles" and then later "dents the parquet", dives headfirst into the basement in the poem Descent. Such a barreling, incisive momentum is apparent in her approach to self, gender and history. Many are the moments when the reader feels caught up alongside Wise in a whirlwind of language and imagination, in rapidly morphing yet unalienating images, like something out of an animation, as when the narrator of The Diarist describes the writing process as "a strange comfort;/it is like a brocade pillow sporting a pattern of inkblots/or a flower bed of bedsprings overgrowing a field/of mattresses or a field of mattresses unstuffing themselves--/innards breaking through seams, bloated with fungal life." Both reader and writer heave a sharp exhalation after that.
Wise is not afraid to get her hands dirty with language, to mix up words, forms and languages themselves (English and German in this case) in cooking up an unholy stew of terror-inducing howls laments and yelps. In "Was Heiss Rechfertigung" she never translates the title literally, but teases out meanings, scenes, from the sounds of the words, allowing the music to tell its story, for the relationship between the languages to act as a mysterious mirror to the author's own ancestral relationship to Germany.
The book is divided into 5 sections, one of which is the title poem, and the second of which is mostly concerned with questions of self-reflection as individual and gendered being. Simply the title of Wise Comma Suzanne serves to illustrate the rewarding ways in which Wise experiments with language: the spelling out of the punctuation mark affords it a new personality, alongside the other two words, making it a sort of third musketeer to the author's name and last name. The poem itself is both a meditation on and flirtation with subjectivity, which, like any powerful element encountered by a lively imagination, the author wields like a toy and regards with reverence. "She bears that bareness like a shield" is the end of the poem, and is indicative of Wise's attitude: her heart is on her sleeve but she expects no praise for it, especially no offers to take part in a fellowship of self-congratulation. Wise is an individualist through and through, though her anxious, powerful heart beats and bleeds for a great many.

In this hinged box of words, where the subjunctive--hypothetical or subordinated--is foregrounded (and with it--power relations), there is something so bracingly raw, something that clings to the face like animal hair to upholstery, something profoundly urgent that you will come back again and again to its persistent utterance sputtering: "Everything that has survived is in rehearsal." Wise depicts a difficult time/space--"the town of migraines and decapitation, / buzzsaws, bloody benches, and gin anesthesia"--where the mediascape & virtuality saturate, multiply, and blanch the self, even our bodies converting-" Splintered glass sequins your skin. / Your hands reaching for the doorknob / sharpen to cones." [...] "You become somber, colder, a kind of high-quality vinyl." Identity spins on a digital skewer -- "the fall is slow, granular. I am all tiny bits."

We feel ourselves burning under the pooled spotlights, then fading out into an emergency broadcast system tone-"you star in your own tactless drama" [...] "you are the expired / landscape soon to surrender / to a great divide." We see ourselves plugged into a network that is all network. We see ourselves losing control to the remote, the designed, the convention--"the audience turning its one gigantic head, / from left to right, then back again."--and the consequent erasure, "I was interference of a negligent nature, / the kind imbedded in TV's static." We sense, with our lessening, bedded senses, that everything is gleaming like waxed linoleum--"all the slick / friction of meaning's excess."

While Wise depicts an emerging dystopia where the Savior locks "himself in a footlocker for three days,"--"a flower bed of bedsprings overgrowing a field / of mattresses or a field of mattresses unstuffing themselves" and languages surfacing--it is how she evokes its effects on our individual selves that is refreshing and disquieting at once. We become transparent in "the vehement pink of the neon-lit sugar factory," but less comprehensible in that skinning--"No matter how precisely / I cross-referenced, no matter how many official reports / I downloaded, I was still not clear." Implicit in this critique is the implications of writing, each code, a departure & suture, a distance & drop line, each of us "shunted back and forth across [the] narrow plank" of incalculable, (expanding & contracting) languages. "To write down our passionate thoughts / at all is already, in some measure, to command / and have our way with them." We traverse Nicht, Nicht diversion. We repeatedly take the wheel, but we are saving nothing, ruining our lovely lack of definition: "Basically, / it is time to stop trying so hard. / Instead, lie back and listen to the waves / smashing shells to bits." This book bobs in its on brilliance like the unborn, is plugged into your wall. What this poet says might be the buoy. Listen:

When I learned what I had to be,
I sat down on my luggage set, and wept. Then I unpacked. I decorated.

[and]

We regret we were forced / to omit so much.

This is one of the most breathtaking, weird, original works of art I've ever read. It's like, "Wake up, boring poetry-world!" Wise is true to the crags and snarls of consciousness, while not sacrificing meaning and readability. Sharp, ruthless, and yet so full of heart this book is bloody. Nothing is spared from Wise's razorsharp observation and acupunctural penetration, especially not the "self" in these poems. Buy lots of copies of this book for all your friends, and lets all hope this frighteningly gifted poet writes fast, because this sad world needs as much of her as possible.

For anyone who has experienced the loss of their mother at a young age -- a very important reminder that grief is not always a bad thing...

This book is a touching collection of poetry and personal stories that will move any reader. Through these women's specific stories, we get to our own personal feelings; the feelings are universal. Although my mother lived till she was 96, I can relate to the depth of emotion expressed by the writers, the poignancy of their observations, the sweetness or anger or loneliness of their images. A non-Catholic, I am deeply moved by Ann Murphy O'Fallon's essay, "Lilacs." She tells how it was when she was nine and the priest came to give her mother Extreme Unction, and they had to dress up for him. Her 13-year-old sister tells her, "It's because she is dying, don't you know anything?" Joanne Kelley ends her poem, "Missing," with the lines, "Imagine a winter so hard that no birds survive and nothing moves in the ice." Cindy Washabaugh writes in her poem, "For Pam, Who Can't Remember," "Grandma stood at the stove crying in the same small voice she laughed in, making Campbell's soup for everyone at 8:45 in the morning because, she said, soup makes you feel better."

Such a brave and often amazing collection--in these never sentimental, always eloquent poems and essays, daughters tell it like it is to have lost the most important person in your young life. And I'm grateful that before each writer speaks, the editors tell me in what way and how old the daughter was when her mother died. In a perfect world, a mother should live long enough to be a comfort and then a vexation and ultimately the wise (or unwise) woman she always was. These women had to make that journey all by themselves. It is a privilege to hear how they did it.

I have vastly enjoyed this book of writings and poems by those who have
lost their mother. It moved me to tears and then to an urgent sense that
I must share this book. We need more beautiful places to grieve our
losses. Becoming whole is a life's work, and grieving fully and sharing
stories that break the spell is part of the process. "Kiss Me Goodnight"
gives one a haven to do so and serves this sacred process."
Marilyn Zimmerman, Associate Professor, Dept. of Art and Art History,
Wayne State University, photography/installation/performance artist
and curator

Get out a new hanky or get the tissue box ready. You'll need it!

In Kiss Me Good Night the editors compiled stories from 47 women who recall their mother's death (if they remember) or how they feel now.

The women, through prose or poetry, tell about their mothers and how certain sounds, smells, tastes and things like seeing a purse (like their mother had) trigger strong emotions of loss and longing--and remembrance.

This unique sisterhood opened their hearts and souls to us, and make us appreciate our mom more--if she's alive, or relieved we were not a young child when she left this earth.

Many women are from an era when people did not talk about death or dying to children, and that left them confused. Many times when the mother died, young children were dispersed to relatives, raised apart, because the father could not work and cope with raising children alone.

Who do you talk to? How do you understand?

Missing their mothers as mom and role model and feeling the loss of her nurturing, these women found that talking to others, even all these years later, was therapeutic. And writing allowed them to help many others.

My most lasting word image is one woman looking through a photo album of a mom she vaguely remembers and seeing a "Kodachrome vitality." Maybe that's a reminder to us to keep family pictures updated to capture our own vitality.

Armchair Interviews says: Powerful, powerful words and the emotions they bring. Kiss Me Goodnight is for those women who have already lost their mother--and those who cannot even bear to think about that happening to them.

Mathias's book is a navigation between gods and bodies, between trespass and impasse. It is language and syntax as frisson, as incandescence: a series of lyrical matrices that flutter like sundresses, more sensual than sexual, more haptical than optical. Mathias repeatedly employs the word "lush," precisely describing her own poems with their nod towards Herrick and his liquefactions. Yet, among light's liquidity and the lark's song, one "is supposed to call to mind / the murderous trees, / rootless and brooding for roots". There is a sense that the speaker(s) of the poems is well aware of Cavafy's terror at "how quickly that dark line gets longer, / how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate"; and yet, reading Mathias's book is to touch that electric hand in the darkness, reminding one what bittersweet eros is embedded in being alive.

The poems in this book may be a bit mysterious, but this is part of what makes them interesting. This book was recommended to me by someone who knows the poet and I am glad because I probably never would have found this terrific book. Not to be sexist, but she's pretty easy on the eyes too. Great pictures on her website.

The poems in Lark Apprentice burn with color, pale and
liquid, and they expand on the page, intense with brevity,
not spare or light. What it is to be a woman, or human,
or to love, or need love, to writhe with those tensions--
that's what's here. The book stands out on its own merits.
They could have been written by ANONYMOUS. Read the poems
for the poems.

This is a beautiful book. I heard the author read from it, and what she was saying about beauty being necessary to counter the darker aspects of life really comes across in these poems. Subterranean is one of the most beautiful, mysterious and tender poems I've read.

I saw Mathias read recently and she seems poised to become a bright light on LA's poetry scene. These poems are full of loose, delicate and lovely tendrils. Carefully composed yet full of fire and emotion-- poems that are equal parts poise and control and reckless beauty. That she has is a lovely physical presence perhaps shouldn't matter except that she was wonderful to watch read in part because of that.

When Joseph Brodsky emigrated to the United States in 1972 as an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union, he probably believed that he'd see his parents again, that political circumstances would inevitably change. Moreover, it is only natural to believe that a forced "political" separation from one's parents could not last for long. His parents spent their final years hoping against hope that they'd see their beloved son one more time-a death wish before dying. But that faithful dream never materialized. "I know," writes Brodsky, "that one shouldn't equate the state with language but it was in Russian that two old people, shuffling through numerous state chancelleries and ministries in the hope of obtaining a permit to go abroad for a visit to see their only son before they died, were told repeatedly, for twelve years in a row, that the state considers such a visit `unpurposeful'..." Letters were mostly forbidden, but Brodsky was allowed to call his parents every week. Phone calls were monitored. Brodsky tells us that they learned how to speak "euphemistically."

"In a Room and a Half" is Brodsky's last attempt to join his parents. Brodsky's father was a professional photographer and journalist. Something of the art of photography must have been passed on to his son. This beautiful narrative was as close as Brodsky could come to presenting a family album of photographic "takes" or "frames" which emerge in the poet's memory from his childhood days. There are forty-five photos that make up "In a Room and a Half."

You cannot possibly stand outside of this memoir as a "detached witness" once you begin to read it. It is as if you were sitting late into the night with Brodsky-the last log is burning out and he begins to tell you about something that is, under ordinary circumstances, a private and solitary affair of the heart. In this sense, we feel privileged, and we want him to go on-to keep turning the pages of his lost youth, to share whatever sacred memories he has left to share about his life with his parents. It is indeed an act of defiance that is anything but sentimental. And yet, who can read this eulogy without feeling their heart drop to the floor?

We listen, and, through Brodsky's genius, enter into these forty-five narrative photographs. We can see and touch the China that his mother saved for his wedding. We hear the sounds of a faucet, the odors from the kitchen. We see the quiet, grey light of this tiny space where father, mother and son lived out their daily activities. We walk around the room with Brodsky as he tells us about the story of his parents' cherished bed. We see a feeble table with a white, luminous tablecloth under the care of his mother's hands. We see the deep blue of his father's uniform and we reach out to touch those bright yellow buttons that remind the boy of an illuminated avenue. It is all so vividly real.

Joseph Brodsky is dead now-and there is nothing that can ever separate this family again.

I translated this book into Hebrew and it was published by sifriat poalim.
For a reader of the old testament in the original freedom and language are one and the same.
Giora Leshem

Brodsky's words flow with the gentle ease of a boat ride on a sunny sunday afternoon, until you find yourself floundering at the bottom of a crashing waterfall. Repeated re-readings of the 'waterfall' line do little to lessen the impact. Brodsky holds nothing back, as he brings his mighty pen to bear against the soviet government that exiled him, and would not allow either of his parents to visit him in the remaining 12 years of their lives.

Primarily known as a poet this volume shows that Joseph Brodsky was also a splendid essayist and his interests varied and his attention to detail deep and probing. Dealing with the trauma of exile his remembrance of things past is like the educational adventure of a long furlough from love and his country submerged in totalitarianism with his mentors either imprisoned, declawed or dead is still the theme upon which he is emotionally impaled.
He seems disgusted by America and in love with his disgust, the social utility of hypocrisy, the halo polishing in the upper echelons and the fawning sycophants chirruping inanely are recognizable figures on both sides of the cold war.
His paeans to poets as diverse as Mandelbaum and W.H AUDEN are astounding in their compassion , knowledge and unlike other critics never infected by logorrhea.
He can't cure what is lost in translation but he makes us aware that a poem is a form of aggression in its purest and most humane form. Brooding, dark and often pessimistic Brodsky is still an illuminating writer because he chooses to create rather than mourn and seems to say that sorrow observed is compensatory idealism but when your love cannot create you are in love with death. And he saw too much to sentimentalize sacrifice and the grim reaper.

This collection of essays is by one of the great Russian poets of this century. In it he writes of his life and poetry, and of those poets who have meant much to him. His memoir of his separation from his parents, their twelve - year effort to reunite while being refused by the Soviet Authorities is a tale of sadness, and pain.
I have just read the essay on Nadezhda Mandelstamm and through it received an insight into her life and literature. At the age of sixty- five never really having written at length before she wrote the two great memoirs of her husband's life that Brodsky considers the true cultural history of Russia in this century.
He writes of the poems of her husband and life together which she remembered.," And gradually those things grew on her. If there is any substitute for love , it'smemory. To memorize , then, is to restore intimacy.Gradually the lines of those poets became her mentality, became her identity. They supplied her not only with the plane of regard or angle of vision; more importantly, they became her linguistic norm.So when she out to write her books, she was bound to gauge-by that time already unwittingly, instinctively- her sentences against theirs. The clarity and remorselessness of her pages, while reflecting the character of her mind, are also inevitable stylistic consequences of the poetry that had shaped that mind.In both their content and style , her books are but a postcript to the supreme version of language which poetry essentially is and which became her flesh through learning her husband's lines by heart."

One of the most striking parts of this essay is Brodsky's description of the great Akhmatova's devotion to Nadezhda Mandelshtamm. Through poverty, destitution, persecution two great friends, one one of the greatest Russian poets of the century , the other the widow of another of the greatest of Russian poets stood by each other.
The humane voice of a great poet is in these essays. And they inspire and remind of the Literature that is not merely words, but rather the 'truth of life.'

Critics describe Crooker's poetry here as "a sublime tonic against the darkness" or "spilling over with energy and movement" or "exquisite." The work in Line Dance is all that, of course. Such critical praise is justified and deserved, but leaves out two important aspects readers need to know. One, regardless of topic -- death, autism, failure, loss -- Barbara Crooker distills beauty from it. Two, her joyous words will be easily understood by readers. She welcomes readers into her world and makes them feel at home.

In "Blues for Karen" Crooker reaches out to a dead friend the best way she knows how, through words and images:

How could you die? We weren't done talking yet.
So I am trying to call you using the morning glories,
whose blue mouths are open to the sky,
whose throats are white stars,
thinking those tendrils could trellis upward,
hand over little green hand, so tenacious,
they hang on in any storm...

Crooker's use of metaphors is reader-friendly. We can all relate to her descriptions with a sense of wonder. This excerpt from "Zero at the Bone" takes us to a frozen place where the wintry season joins the unwritten lines of the heart:

The scouring light of winter
scrubs whatever it falls on,
the bright whiteness revealing
all the small incursions,
marks and stains of another year.
In the bare bones of trees, we see
old nests, broken branches, bagworm,
gall, all that was hidden by summer's
green scrim. Now we are at the heart
of things, the bone chill
of zero, the closed eye
of the pond. No secrets.

Buried within "The VCCA Fellows Visit the Holiness Baptist Church, Amherst, Virginia" is one of the sweetest, most touching and comforting ruminations on death I've ever read:

...a deacon speaks of his sister,
who's "gone home," and I realize he doesn't mean
back to Georgia, but she's passed over. I float
on this sweet certainty, of a return not to the bland
confection of wispy clouds and angels in nightshirts,
but to childhood's kitchen, a dew-drenched June
morning, roses tumbling by the back porch.

These poems represent "the thin rind of memory" protecting the juicy pulp that is Barbara Crooker's life and poetic mind. Highly recommended.

Barbara Crooker's poem are easy to like. She has a flair for words and images that touch the heart. It helps to read this book from beginning to end becuase she has organized the poems so beautifully around the central poem, "Line Dance."

In this, her second collection of poems, Barbara Crooker explores the territory of what brings us joy, of what breaks our hearts. Grief and love. "Grief and heart could be the same word," she suggests. "Both have / five letters; both rhyme / with blood." It's not sadness that occupies these poem, rather the idea that in spite of grief, there is joy in the simple things life offers: the swelling bud of a pink peony, grey juncos at her bird feeder, the autistic son who surprises her, the dead who dance at a wedding. Crooker has the ability to bring light into the darkest spaces; her poems burst with color: lemons and the lavish light of yellow, red hearts in windows facing a snowy landscape, brown-eyed sunflowers. There is music in these poems, in her deft use of language, in the surprising and oh-so satisfying way Crooker can bring in that last image, like a bow at the end of a performance. You will leave these poems dancing and satisfied, too, that you were allowed a few moments in the world of her extraordinary poetic ear and eye.

I'm riffing on the warm air, the wing beats of my lungs
that can take this all in, flush the heart's red peony,
then send it back without effort or thought.
And the trees breathe in what we exhale,
clap their green hands in gratitude, bend to the sky.

What Crooker has done with "dance" is splendid, so much so I will never see the word in the same manner for the rest of my life. Every poem is excellent, and all of them seamlessly unified with "la danse de vivre." Bravo to her!

Larry D. Thomas
2008 Texas Poet Laureate

Close to twenty years ago, I read a Crooker poem, "Raspberries," in the collection, The Lost Children. Until then, I had never found such erotic beauty in a fruit ... and beauty/redemption in what scars our lives, as in "Christ Comes to Centralia," from the same collection.

With Line Dance the simple beauty remains, but each seems filled with particulars, e.g., in describing the Pennsylvania mountains, Crooker reveals: "... Blue, Allegheny, Kittatinny / Tuscarora, this big-muscled, broad-backed / hunk of a state." Or in listing the winters of impressionist artists: "Caillebotte's chimneys exhale like glamorous / women in a cafe."

Crooker's strong metaphorical language inhabits the lines, but the poems seem airy and natural. Each word is perfectly placed; the line endings are natural--not straining toward the jarring/illogical effect of much contemporary poetry; and the final lines are lessons for anyone who has ever wondered how to end a poem.

Other reviewers have mentioned the "autism poems," and anyone who reads such poems as "45s, LPs" will understand how, as in other fields of endeavour, less is more! The "less" in this and other poems that deal with the autism of her son, breaks our hearts--less is more.

And, perhaps, in this amateur review, I should end with less: Buy and Read this Book.

This book got me a husband! Try it and see what you might get! I read it in 2001 and fell in love with Molly's poetry. I decided to take her class at the UC Davis Extension. There was a very cute guy in the class with me...today I have a handsome husband who writes excellent poetry and two adorable children, all thanks to "Listening to Winter!"

Molly Fisk's volume of poetry, Listening to Winter, is candid, clear and understated as her stories unfold. And the reader, at the end of each line, wishes for blurred focus, hopes the next line will not confirm what has just been read. Themes of survival, abandonment, and truth-telling are interwoven with a rich pictoral landscape. I took away immense strength and admiration for Fisk's facility with language. A must read for students of life, language and women.

Molly plunges you into the terror and humiliation of the greatest personal harm, the most intimate human betrayal, with raw courage and boldness, with the keenest understanding, the clearest, most vivid images, with exquisite, painful, beauty. She tells the truth of it. This is a gift beyond measure. Finally, you're not alone anymore. The closet door has been flung wide open and love becomes possible once more. She makes it so. Molly Fisk is a fine poet. I can't recommend her work highly enough.

"Listening to Winter" is full of wonderful poetry, the poem containing the title line "Hunter's Moon" is so evocative of my youth that I gobbled the rest of the book in an orgy of reading and feelings. Then, hungry for more, read each line again slowly, as if sipping great wine.

"Sugar & Salt" let me FEEL what before I'd only glimpsed. "Couples" made me cry out in pain, yearning to talk to my long dead father. "Veterans" renewed the thrill of having lived when so many didn't, made me rejoice I came back whole enough to be healed by my loving wife. This wonderful book reafirmed my joy of being alive, of being part of this lovely world and in love.

If you love great poetry, buy this book!

Bright Blessing on you Molly, where-ever you are. Thank you.

If you have ever cared for a woman, buy this book.

Thank you Ms. Fisk for your terrifying but wonder insights into the word of pain, shame & humiliation shared by all incest survivors. It is heartening & frightening to realize both that we ALL, all men can & could be betrayers and abusers of trust. Users and abusers of those either in our power or under our protection if we just follow our desires. We could be but are not, are not because we chose to be better than the potential beast within. We are better men because we make conscious choices to be the best we can be instead of taking the easy path of choosing to have all the pleasure we can take, regardless of the pain and damage caused.

Your poetry, your pain ennobles us. It helps us to be the men we should be by showing so clearly the horrible damage caused and pain inflicted by being like your father.

Thank you. For all us us I thank you.

The pictures are really engaging, ss with most books illustrated by Garth Williams.
The book counts from 1 to 10, so is suitable for the younger child/toddler. The rhymes for each number are really sweet.

I was cautious at first, but this book is such a treasure! Great teaching aide, made easy for children to learn. Adorable illustrations.
My one and a half yr. old loves it. This is the best counting book!!!

I love this book - so does my little one. It was my favorite as a child and when I saw it in a store, I didn't even think about it. I just grabbed it and ran! It does an excellent job of teaching little ones their numbers and number recognition. It also has them count each thing that appears in the illustrations. The pictures are just darling and very life-like as well. You have to buy this book - it's really that good.

This book is wonderful! The pictures are very colorful and peaceful to look at. Just as important, the flow and rhythm of the book is amazingly catching. I have had the entire book memorized for years, and that is without even trying.

I loved the book at 5, and I still love it at 27. I had this book as a kid, and I give it to all my friends who have children.

If you know someone who is learning to count, or someone who is a child at heart, this is the perfect book for them!

My dad read this book to my sister and I when we were small. We loved it more than any other book out there! The rhymes and illustrations were superior. We all still remember each and every number and group of animals associated with the number. My sister has given this book as a baby gift for years, and now that she is having a baby of her own, she is planning on having the nursery designed with the adorable animals! It is a must read and really helps little kids enjoy both math and reading throughout life!!!

It is great to have a look into Mao's China from the eyes of a child. I agree with many of the good things said, and just want to say this is a great book. Lyric, and a child's view, and great insight.

It's one thing to read the history of China's Cultural Revolution, quite another to see it through the eyes of a little girl who lived through it. In "Little Green," Chun Yu, born the year the Cultural Revolution began (1966), chronicles the first ten years of her life, from the revolution's inception to its ending with Mao's death.

What's startling about "Little Green" - the title comes from Yu's childhood nickname - is not just the vivid clarity of her memories but the beauty of her words. Written in verse, the book has the crystalline luminosity of Peter Matthiessen's prose and David Whyte's poetry. On one page Yu will speak eloquently of the gift of a blue silk ribbon; on another she'll share her pain - without being overly sentimental - at having her family's garden torn out after the state decided that private gardens were capitalistic.

"After a whole spring and early summer
of planting and watering,
the tomatoes were just starting to ripen under the green leaves.
Some melon flowers were still blooming on the fence.
The biggest melons had grown to the size of my little fists.
The sunflowers along the roadside
were only a couple of feet tall,
with tender yellow flowers following the sun around.
Nainai [Grandma] sighed.
'It hurts the conscience to destroy these crops.
What crime did the plants commit?' "

In this slender volume, Yu shows how her family is affected by the Cultural Revolution. Her mother, a teacher, becomes a target of the anti-intellectual movement; her father is sent for several years to a reeducation camp. In "We Saw Baba Only Twice a Year," Yu writes:

"Baba lived in May Seventh Cadre School,
where he was being reeducated.
The cadre school could only be reached by boat,
slowly moved by a long bamboo stick.
It took a whole day each way.
We saw Baba only twice a year,
in the summertime
and Chinese New Year.
After not seeing him for a long time,
it felt so strange to call him 'Baba' again."

The cover quote, from Maxine Hong Kingston, calls "Little Green" a "miracle" which initially sounded a bit over the top. But as I read the book and learned Yu's story, I didn't find this to be an exaggeration. For someone who learned English as an adult and spent much of her time in this country studying science, "Little Green," written with elegant simplicity in English, truly is miraculous.

I found "Little Green" so enjoyable that I began rationing it, reading just a few pages a night, to make it last. Thankfully, this is the first book of a trilogy, and Yu says she's already finished the second volume. I'll eagerly await its publication. Until then, I'll return often to Little Green's clear, bright lines.

Little Green is a wondrous work of art, like an ancient Chinese painting brought forward into modern time. Where a Western painter might fill up the entire canvas with paint, traditional Chinese painters used sparse brush strokes to vividly illuminate the very essence of their subject. So does Chun Yu use her poetry to bring to life the world of a ten year old child in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Like the unfolding of a Chinese scroll, to read her verse is to journey across the landscape of that time. We see her family, other children, revolutionaries and "counter-revolutionaries," political struggle meetings, war trainings, cold streams, warm meals, forbidden ancient poetry, and the sound of snowflakes falling past her ear.

Little Green is suitable for all ages, both children and adults. From her readings in the San Francisco bay area, I also learned that this book is the first in a coming trilogy. I give it five stars.

This book powerfully tells what life was truly like under Mao and his cohort. Chun Yu brings a new voice with an amazing ability to enable the reader to imagine life inside China during the Cultural Revolution.

This is a fresh and new voice to the history of that era.

PS I am not a kid although submitting a review as a child is easier as there is no password stuff to climb through.

Chun Yu's "Little Green" is a great corrective to much of the highly effective propaganda that emanated from China during Mao Tse-Dong's Cultural Revolution. Chun Yu has achieved this with a unique voice and with a unique literary form that is unusually poetic and that is not in itself a propaganda piece.

I believe that "Little Green" should be classified as suitable for all ages. While children will undoubtedly enjoy and learn from "Little Green," I think it ought more properly to be included with literature also intended for adults.

Just buy it. These old childrens books are far better than a lot of the modern stuff out there.

I really loved this book when I was little, and here it is, 30+ years later, and I am seeking it out as a gift :)

I think the things that I truly loved about it was how there was a little spider (I think?) that was hidden on every page. It gave me a stronger focus on viewing the detailed pages. I also liked the fact that it didn't seem like a "baby book" to me, even when I was barely able to read ;)

my favorite book as a kid & now i read my old
copy to my son!

I bought this book after trying to no avail to find it at my parent's home. It was my FAVORITE book when I was a child. It was equally difficult to find since I no longer had the name of the book or who the author was. However, after multiple searches, and finally figuring out who the author was, I found it! What a treasure. Now I can read it to my daughter, 100,000 times. She is 2-1/2 and enjoys the book as well. The illustrations are fun and lively, and the rhymes are sweet (well, as sweet as possible when you are talking about a book on monsters!)

We recommend this book!

I recently was asked the question,"What's your favorite children's book?" on a survey. This was an obvious choice for me. I can still recite most of the monster's rhymes by heart 20 years later. I bought Mercer Mayer's new Professor Wormbog book for my niece a few month's back because it has all of the same characters.