Richard Wilbur Books

This is a history of Greek mathematics from the point of view of problems and problem solving, not least the three classical problems: cube duplication, circle quadrature, angle trisection. Knorr argues that this restriction is not arbitrary: "One seems typically to assume that metamathematical concerns were the effective motivating force underlying efforts of geometers ... In general, I will find most convincing the 'internalist' position that technical research is directed toward the solution of problems arising from previous and current research efforts", mathematics thus being "on the whole autonomous in setting the directions of research". So the focus on problems is a way to understand the development of Greek mathematics by exposing the mindsets of the mathematicians. This aspect is naturally very interesting, and the mere presence of such perspectives sets this book apart from the bare bones histories of Heath et al. However, grand programs and pretty pots on the cover is not everything. Our fragmented knowledge of Greek mathematics does not allow Knorr's program to be carried out in a completely satisfactory manner; neither is the big picture one of Knorr's main concerns. Instead much of the book amounts to quite specialised scholarly analysis of sources and critique of other scholarly interpretations. In the end, one is not entirely convinced that Knorr has unveiled the key to understanding Greek mathematics. His criticism of other interpretative schemes is convincing but sometimes suspiciously convenient. So, for instance, Knorr rather enjoys arguing that philosophy never had a major influence on mathematics (thus supporting his point of view) while the more interesting and relevant questions of the influences of astronomy, mechanics and optics are largely silenced.

This is the first UK publication of A BESTIARY, a beguiling menagerie in words and drawings only hitherto available as a signed, limited edition published in the United States in 1955. This beautifully produced book is based on the original collaboration between Richard Wilbur and Alexander Calder, for which Calder created more than fifty whimsical drawings in his own unique style and Wilbur choose excerpts from classic works of literature -- poetry, essays, novels, plays, stories -- to accompany them.

In this enchanting book one finds such unexpected combinations as Faulkner on the Dog, Machiavelli on the Centaur, Disraeli on the Ape, T. E. Lawrence on the Camel, Thoreau on the Mouse, Laurence Sterne on the Fly, Plato on the Grasshopper, and Bertrand Russell on the Unicorn, among many others.

A BESTIARY is timeless, with delights for young and old alike. It is a book that will bring endless pleasure, proving that the combination of animals, art and literature is irresistible.

(As this review is written, there is only one copy of this title available, and the asking price is astronomical. I suggest you keep checking back - it's a good book but not THAT good. I bought mine for under twenty bucks! Here's my review for a more reasonably priced edition):
It's the excellent color photographs in this little book that make it a worth while purchase. All of the photos were taken at Kings Landing Historical Settlement in New Brunswick where the docents dress in period appropriate clothing, which puts the carriages in their proper perspective. Each picture of the carriages and sleighs are accompanied by the type of buggy, as well the period it is from. Sometimes the info includes the original prices.
The last quarter of this 72 page book is dedicated to the carriage makers themselves, including original 19th and early 20th century pictures.
From what I understand, all of the carriages presented here (except for the carriage maker pics) belong to Kings Landing. If this is the case, they have quite a collection, which makes me want to head up to the historic village and check them all out in person.
This is a very easy and quick read for anyone who has an interest in horse-drawn vehicles. The pictures alone are worth the money.

This enchanting theater piece from the French baroque period deserves to be better known to English audiences. It combines comedy, tragedy, and tragi-comedy as it plays with the ever fresh themes of reality vs. illusion and theater vs. actual life. Wilbur's translation, in rhymed couplets, is distinguished not surprisingly by shrewd word choice and wit throughout. If the play has a flaw, I would say it's in the character of Matamore, the cowardly braggart. His appearances, as Corneille conceived them, involve - unfortunately - a large amount of non-incremental repetition in character and dialogue. All in all, though, the play in this translation is fascinating and worthy of production.

Well into her 70s, Rhina Espaillat-Moskowitz is a prodigy in that she continues to write the same sentimental poem over and over again, with the same thumping pentameters and forced rhymes. Her poems are often stories borrowed from the imagined pasts of her Morano ancestors, who fled persecution in Spain for the Dominican Republic, and then persecution in the Dominican Republic for the USA. Always, always, they are noble souls. Yes, always.

Though grandmotherish in tone, devoid of vision, and musically challenged, she does pull some of the poems off in this collection. For that I will give her one star, one which I hope she will wear proudly.

Rhina P. Espaillat, one of America's foremost living Formalist poets, eschews overt fireworks in her poetry. Like Vermeer--of whose paintings she has written most perceptively--Espaillat is a specialist in illuminating the quiet, everyday corners of our lives. She knows that the most quotidian things--a sign for a highway offramp, for example--can be symbolic of our deepest emotions, as in "Minefields":
Homebound past Wallingford you'll say, again,
"This is where Lenny lived; he died--let's see--
in forty-five, in Belgium; that was when
his jeep blew up. He was nineteen, like me."
Everywhere Espaillat sheds light on placid scenes and the complex life that looms just behind them. "Retriever," a winsome piece of anthropomorphism, depicts a dog philosophizing about the significance of his life. The masterful sonnet "Nightline" succinctly presents the horror we feel at the news of yet another high-school massacre. "Paper," another fine sonnet, shows the poet discarding once-meaningful old documents "that will not mean a thing to anyone." Espaillat has reached that stage in life when the process of attrition becomes inexorable; against that, she upholds her bedrock belief in beauty, sanity, and civilization. Like a lamp in the window, her poetry is a welcome beacon of hope to all of us 21st-century readers.

Rhina Espaillat is a wonderful formal poet. I highly recommend her last book, 'Where Horizons Go.' This latest collection is easily as good. Once again she shows her mastery of meter and form (and this one is also loaded with sonnets) and she has a graceful use of language. The subject material of this collection seems to be a bit more serious.

The best I can do for this book is to briefly look at my three favorite poems. "Retriever" is a dramatic monologue where the narrator is a dog. It's a touching poem about the love and devotion of dogs towards their people. The essence is in why dogs do this: "...Why/ do I serve him? Who else would recover/treasures heýs always losing? " It's a touching and humorous poem. "Unto Each Thing" takes the topic of death, and life. Where a neighbors garden blooms more beautiful the spring their child died. We like to think that life and beauty in the face of death can help. But "too much, smell wearied, skin recoiled/from silk and velvet leaves to touch", and Rhina shows us it does not. The final stanza really sticks with you:

and mind ached with the gardenerýs back
bent to the clacking of old shears
over big, heavy-breasted blossoms
gathering earthward like slow tears.

"Three Versions" is a poem where the narrator dreams her own death. It contains lines such as: "I settled in the mould, but begged them to/take word of me to those my death would wrong" and "I woke to the third dayýs inhuman chill,/rank with the scent of mould. I smell it still."

This collection spends a lot of time delving into death and other more serious concerns not seen as much in her earlier collections.

The Richard Wilbur Award usually signifies a good collection of poetry, and A.M. Juster's book is no exception, in fact, it is a really good collection of poetry. Juster has mastered the sonnet and shorter poem, but where he really shined here was his long narrative, "The Secret Language of Women," which is such a phenomenal poem. It's really one of the better narratives I've read recently. This is definitely one of those collections you want to add to your poetry shelf.

Like X.J. Kennedy and the late John Frederick Nims, A.M. Juster excels in epigrammatic, flowing yet tightly constructed formal verse. This sort of cool, witty elegance was casually discarded by most American poets sometime around 1950, but fortunately a few noble eccentrics such as Juster have insisted on reviving it. The long title poem of "The Secret Language of Women," set in an indeterminate, long-ago imperial China before shifting at the end to the time of Mao, is a superb example of formal narrative verse and a moving demonstration that poetry may be driven underground, but it can never be killed. However, I found myself even more attracted to the shorter, funnier pieces--the excellent translations from the Chinese, French, and Latin, and such cheeky sonnets as "The Awesome Attorneys of Oz" and "On Remembering Your Funeral Was Today" ("I bet by now that you have stolen time/To edit `The Beginner's Guide to Hell'...I see you basting in satanic slime /Before deep-frying in your cockroach shell"). My favorite poem in the collection--one of my favorite poems, in fact, of the past decade--is "Letter to Auden," in which Juster attempts to bring the deceased poet up to date: "However, I'm delighted to report/That you became a hot pop property/When `Four Weddings' exhumed your poetry./You would have been amused to see its star/Arrested with a hooker in his car..." Hilarious and humane, A.M. Juster brings the pleasure principle back to poetry. "The Secret Language of Women" is a must for those who refuse to believe that formal poetry is dead.

Bland and contrived, the poems in this collection represent all that is wrong with 90% of formalist poetry. For poetry to work, whether free or metered, it must maintain some element of spontaneity and surprise. Juster's poems never achieve this and come off as uninspired exercises.

This book really needs improvment. I mean, the story has absolutely NO action! It is about three kids, Monk, Scho,and Glennie playing a game of catch,and then Scho all of a sudden, starts acting silly and stupid and said that he controled Monk and Glennie and made them do whatever he wanted them to do. So they that made Monk came up the branches to where Scho was, and pushed him off the apple tree.

I can't really recommend this book to anyone because adults will think that this book is boring and kids won't understand the GIANT, BIG long words that are in this book. So what I am basically saying is, don't buy this book!

Thank you very much. Your time is appreciated!

A brilliant short story of the ambiguity and paradox of adolescent relationships. Although ostensibly describing a situation as mundane as two boys consumed in a mindless game of catch when a third, gloveless boy appears, the depth of character of all three boys is richly and adeptly developed . Charater motivation is as complex and confusing to each of the three boys portrayed as it is for the reader. This brief story displays powerful insight into human behavior in breathtakingly few words

This book, with the amazingly original title, is a collection of four of Wilbur's earliest books -- The Beautiful Changes, Ceremony, Things of This World, and Advice to a Prophet. Rather counterintuitively, it begins with the latest book, Advice to a Prophet, and works its way backwards, so that if you read it front to back, you get a sort of anti-development of the young poet.

I would say that there are about fifteen good poems here, and two or three really great poems. Wilbur works with form meter and rhyme, which seems exceedingly rare in more modern poets, and when he does it well, it is a thing of beauty. "Love Calls us to the Things of This World" -- a poem about waking, angels, and laundry-- is wonderful, as is a naturalistic farewell letter to a dead friend, "The Mill". But too often he is clever with form -- too clever for his own good. He can say a thing beautifully, but you still wonder if it was worth saying.

A personal theory: Regardless of style, form, content, agenda or tone, a poet's singular task to develop a unique and distinct voice. Anyone worth listening to (poet, musician, philosopher, artist) has a distinct way of seeing the world, and the point of the art is to communicate that to the rest of us in some manner. Enough theory; enough to say that what seems to be lacking most in this collection of Wilbur's poetry is this quality of voice. I cannot tell you what type of poet Wilbur is, short of a formalist, and that's not the point. The point is there is no point. And that's the problem.

To come back down to earth. This poetry is accessible (sometimes at the cost of being profound) and is a good study in form. It is average with a leaning towards above-average -- the middle book "Things of this World", won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, because it more often ascends above the average. It's not bad poetry, but maybe there's a good reason these individual books have gone out of print and are unlikely to return. Not entirely unforgettable.

Richard Wilbur will probably never be viewed as a 'great' poet. His poems seem slight and perhaps too easy to comprehend in an age that has put a premium on dense and obscure poetry. His major success as a writer has been in his wonderful translations of Moliere's plays, but his poems offer the same kind of appeal as his translations - a keen sense of fun in lanuage, a fresh perspective and an economy of expression. I suspect that even readers who don't normally turn to poetry would enjoy the sense of play that underlies so many of these poems and the elegance with which he expresses playfulness. Even when the subject is serious, the leaness of the language, the selection of just the right word or phrase for the purpose, gives Wilbur's work a kind of classical timelessness. And if one likes reading aloud, the sound of Wilbur's lines has a full pleasantness that is a joy to the ear. Reading any of his poems a few times will leave phrases in the mind just begging to be repeated.

This is not poetry to rival Milton or Eliot for either thematic grandeur or emotional impact. But for the shear joy of thought embodied in language there is no contemporary poet whose work is more satisfying.

I fully expected to love this book - rural setting, conciseness influenced by far Eastern poetry, political and religious awareness. All the poems are well written - but neither images, word usage or emotion stick in the reader's memory. Yes, there are a few exceptions: "You (the earth)were hungry / like us / for seed" in "the earth" or from "the old teacher": "that's how he wanted to help us / construct the world: / solid everyday life/ and occasional expeditions / inward to the borders of mystery." But there are few enough exceptions for me to recommend this book only to those with a specific interest in Scandanavian or Norwegian poetry.

I fully expected to love this book - rural setting, conciseness influenced by far Eastern poetry, political and religious awareness. All the poems are well written - but neither images, word usage or emotion stick in the reader's memory. Yes, there are a few exceptions: "You (the earth)were hungry / like us / for seed" in "the earth" or from "the old teacher": "that's how he wanted to help us ' construct the world: / solid everyday life/ and occasional expeditions / inward to the borders of mystery." But there are few enough exceptions for me to recommend this book only to those with a specific interest in Scandanavian or Norwegian poetry.

I trust the Richard Wilbur Award books. Generally they are great books (for example, books from A.E. Stallings, Rhina P. Espaillat, and A.M. Juster). And I expected Carper's book to be another one of the great ones, after all, it is mostly sonnets, and I love sonnets. But I found that though they were technically well-written sonnets they didn't hold the magic that truly wonderful poetry contains. There were some good poems in the book, and I thought there were three great poems: "Why Did The" was hilarious; "Flypaper"; and "A Late Rembrandt Self-Portrait"--I could see it, you knew just exactly which one Carper was writing about. I wouldn't tell anyone not to buy this book, but I'm not going to recommend it either.