Poetry Books

So many essays stay with me. They are written in a short form but packed with a punch! I found myself needing and wanting to feel (more) centered and after reading this book..it has been achieved. It is always great to pick up a book from your bookshelf, hold it in your hands and read..and dream..and remember..and reflect again and again. :)Enjoy!!

I bought this book maybe 10 or 12 years ago very shortly after it was published when I found it in a gift shop near my house. I fell in love with it standing in the store browsing through it and had to take it home. It has travelled with me to 4 states and 6 homes and has consistently been unpacked and placed right back on my bookshelf where it belongs. One of only about 10 books that I can say that about. It inspires me whenever I look at it, full of the most obvious and wonderful wisdom told in the most eloquent voice of Brian Andreas. You will connect with several of the stories you read, probably most of them, and like me you will want to hang them on your wall to remind you daily of how you really feel in your soul. This is a great find.

I bought this book for a friend after he discovered the website and loved all the drawings and stories. I don't think anyone can escape from being touched by them. There is something in there for everyone, for every situation. I highly recommend you give it to someone you love today.

I saw this book in a boutique in Paducah, KY about 4 years ago. Flipping through a few pages, I needed no more convincing. I purchased the book, read it and placed it in our bookcase. Within the last four years, I have had two children and moved to a different town. I was unpacking some boxes the other day when I found this book. There I sat on the floor, reading through it. I couldn't stop until I was done. I logged on to find more of Brian Andreas's work. It is amazing. So simple, yet so touching. You have to read it!

This little book defies classification. It is a collection of goofy-looking, childlike drawings, on one page, and enigmatic strange little aphorisms, on the facing page, all the way through the book. The pages aren't numbered and there are no chapters, so you just have to wander around and experience whatever you happen to find. Whatever time you spend with this book will be worth it.

Author Brian Andreas is one who thinks outside the box. He draws outside the box, too. And you will soon realize, outside the box is a very good place to be. A place to consider what is really important and meaningful: Love, relationships, children, magic. These are the important things.

The childlike manner is deceptive. This is a book of serious wisdom and serious art, with a silly and childlike appearance. If you can play outside the box, you will love this book, and you will want to give it to all your out-of-the-box friends.I can't recommend Mostly True too highly! Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber

Emmaline is a mouse who lives in a house in Emily Dickinson's room. They become friends very quickly and write poems together.

This was an excellent book, and I recommend it to everyone.

Emmaline is a mouse who lives behind the wainscoting of Emily Dickinson's bedroom and is a small, but courageous writer. The Mouse Of Amherst is a unique and effective little story for young children that aptly introduces wonderful poetry woven into the warm and superbly crafted story. Illustrations by Claire A. Nivola are perfect augmentations to Elizabeth Spires's engaging and memorable tale.

I am a librarian who loves children's literature. I have always been a huge fan of Emily Dickinson. When I bought this book, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am now in the process of analyzing it for my college classes, and I find it is even richer than I originally thought. The child who is lucky enough to read this book will come away with the idea that the written word is important, and so is to find one's own talents in life,to find what excites a child to feel that a "whirligig is spinning in my brain." The child will find the importance of friendship in this small volume, and will become introduced in an easy way to poetry and Emily Dickinson. It is a timeless piece which can be used in elementary school as well as high school, where a teacher could truly concentrate on the rich imagery and symbolism. Emmaline will touch a child's heart.

I RECOMMEND THE MOUSE OF AMHERST, ESPECIALLY IF YOU LIKE POEMS. IT IS ABOUT A MOUSE NAMED, EMMALINE WHO GOES TO LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE AS A POET NAMED ELIZABETH. THEY WRITE POEMS TO TELL EACH OTHER THINGS. ONE DAY THE MOUSE TRAPPER COMES . WILL EMMALINE BE OK? READ THIS BOOK TO FIND OUT!

"I am a mouse, a white mouse. My name is Emmaline. Before I met Emily, the great poet of Amherst, I was nothing more than a crumb gatherer, a cheese nibbler, a mouse-of-little-purpose. There was an emptiness in my life that nothing seemed to fill. All that changed the day I moved into the Dickinson residence on Main Street..." Emmaline moves into the simple, quiet, sunny upstairs bedroom, and begins her new life in the wainscoting of Emily's room. She observes the Dickinson family, and is most fascinated by her new roommate, Emily. "She always wore white. She seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once, fluttering through the house like a ghost, stirring up a batch of gingerbread in the kitchen, or walking in the garden, lost in reverie..." Emily is always sitting at her little desk in deep concentration, writing and scribbling on small scraps of paper, and this intrigues the little mouse. When a small scrap finally lands on the floor near Emmaline's door, she snatches it up and begins reading. "Imagine my surprise when I realized I was holding a poem! The words spoke to me. These were my feelings exactly, but ones I had always kept hidden for fear the world would think me a sentimental fool..." Emmaline turns the paper over and words begin to pour out of her; a poem of her own. Then she returns the scrap with her new poem on the back to Emily's desk. That night while Emmaline slept, Emily read her poem and wrote back, slipping the note paper under her little mouse door. "I'm Nobody! Who are you?/Are you-Nobody-too/Then there's a pair of us!/Don't tell! they'd banish us-you know!..." And that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship..... Elizabeth Spires has written an engaging, gentle, and evocative introduction to the great poet, Emily Dickinson. Her charming and creative story, told often in poems passed back and forth between mouse and Myth, is sometimes poignant, often humorous, and always enlightening. Claire Nivola's black and white sketches complement the text beautifully, and together word and art paint a lovely portrait of the elusive and reclusive Dickinson and her genius, with great insight. Perfect for youngsters 9-12, The Mouse Of Amherst makes an even better read aloud book the entire family can share, and includes an Author's note about Emily Dickinson's life and her poetry to augment and enhance the story and open interesting discussions. This sweet little treasure is sure to whet the appetite of both young and old, and send kids out looking for more. It works well as a companion book to Jeanette Winter's Emily Dickinson's Letters To The World, and Michael Bedard's Emily.

The book showed up in a timely fashion and was brand new, just like it said online.

Terrance Hayes is a name you will see again. I promise you.

An earlier edition of this book came into my hands shortly after I worked with this wonderful poet at a seminar for younger poets. A wonderful first collection. So human it hurts. Get it now that it's back in print!

I just had the pleasure of seeing and hearing Terrance Hayes read at the University of Idaho. He was nervous, I think, and the room was big and strange, but this young man can write. He can really write. The new book--HIP LOGIC--is going to be terrific, and I'll bet each book that comes after will be better yet. A really splendid new talent.

I first became familiar with Mr. Hayes' work, when i saw his poem "Blackbird" in a 1995 double issue of ObsidianII: Black Literature In Review. It appeared opposite a poem I publshed in the journal. Every poem in Muscular Music, is a snapshot about African American life, and sings a song of america: "Late," "Goliath," "Something For Marvin," "Blackbird," "The Yummy Suite," " What I am..." The Black experience is all in here... I was laughing my ass off at " I want to be fat" and I'm a big guy.Expect Terrence Hayes to be a major poet in the literary canon.

Terrance Hayes has written a book where the poems have bite. These poems are hard-hitting, honest, sincere and yet suffused with "tenderness." "Yummy Suite" is one of the most powerful sequence of poems I have read anywhere that confront what is going on in our urban neighbourhoods today. I also loved "Late," "Goliath" and too many more to name. Here is a writer well worth getting to know. If I may riff on the Reuben Jackson quote that serves as an epilogue, Terrance Hayes' Muscular Music is a book that also "reveals itself" one splendid "black note at a time." Buy this book -- read it aloud and share it with a friend!

What god or goddess at which mystery school taught Bruce MacKinnon the strong love and yearning that he shows for his father, mother, wife and son and who taught him the felicitous turns of phrase that give them life on these pages? What woman would not want to be the inspiration for "Atlantis" or the child commemorated by the "Butter Knife" or the mother so tenderly recalled in "Stories?" B. Forden

MacKinnon's poetry is intense, sometimes dark, definitely mood-altering, and nothing short of brilliant! I tried to limit myself to reading only one or two poems per day (not an easy task) in order to fully digest the beauty of his thought-provoking visions. I loved this book, will pass it on to friends, and will read it again and again.

I read poetry only if I happen upon it. By some good fortune I happened upon this lovely book. I got all the poems, identified with many. hope for the rest, look forward to books to follow.

Mystery Schools delightfully accessible, poignant, brutally honest, and universal in its portrayal of the author's experience. Very enjoyable reading.

Published in September, Mystery Schools seems particularly suited to the fall of the year. There is an underlying poignancy to many of MacKinnon's poems. It's not that they are winter-cold or somber, but the loving moments from his life, so vividly portrayed, are often tinged with sadness. The portraits of his father and mother are especially moving - even heart-wrenching - especially "Stories," "A Different Law," and "A Cabin in the Woods."

I found myself thinking of Mystery Stories as I drove alone last week, on a crisp day when the sun illuminated stands of brilliant red and orange foliage, only to be covered the next instant by scudding dark clouds.

The initiation rituals of the mystery schools were often dark, weren't they? And some of the glimpses the author gives us of his coming-of-age years reveal the careless cruelties common to the young, seen now through the mature eyes of a thoughtful, loving man, whose journey is laid bare before us in a series of reflections and meditations. Here is a soul whom we find in several poems seeking his way as a young man in a holy order: "then I'm on my knees scrubbing cracks in tile/ with a toothbrush, not at all sure how I got here,/ knowing it has something to do with light."

Ultimately, however, it's the death of the father, not the Son, which casts a chiaroscuro image, like scattered sunlight on the shadowed forest of fallen and falling autumn leaves, on all the stories of this talented poet's life.

I look forward to his next collection.

It's amazing how beautifully Milosz's poetry translates into English. For those of us who are in love with poetry of nature, history, and love itself, this is the perfect addition to any library.

It is difficult often to take to heart a poet in translation. It is difficult too for the modern reader to focus on a Poet who does not dwell in his own subjective consciousness, and does not have 'I' at the heart of his world of perception. For these reasons it took me time to 'get into' these poems but once I did I felt in the presence of a specially wonderful world of poetry, an especially rich and observant sensibility. The 'wake- up' poem for me was one of Milosz's most famous, 'Campo dei Fiori'. In this poem Milosz compares the square in Florence in which Giordano Bruno was burned with the square in Warsaw close to the burning Warsaw Ghetto. He richly details the life which goes on all around in the two squares, and the indifference of all to the great suffering.
"Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died."
In this same collection Milosz has a set of three small remarkable poems one on Hope, one on Faith, and one on Love.
"Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it from various ills-
A bird and a tree say to him. Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things,
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves.
Who serves best doesn't always understand.'

Milosz wrote poetry for seventy years, and his poems line by line do not cease to surprise. He shows an astonishing combination of intellect and feeling. His poems are rich with observations of the external world. Naming the things and the phenomena of the world seem in one way at the heart of his vision.
But it should not be forgotten that his poetry has a strong political and historical dimension. He was one who sympathized deeply with the victims of the Nazis, who fought against Communist oppression. His poems show a feeling for an understanding of freedom. They are also rich in religious feeling though this comes mediated by irony and questioning.
Milosz is too a Poet deeply in touch with the earth, who sees it in detail and from afar at once. In his Nobel Speech he quotes the writer Selma Lagerlof who said that the way of the Poet is to at once fly above reality and at the same time be down close observing it. This double - perception of seeing from afar and seeing from close- up pervades all those long- lined multi- stanzad poems so remote from what has been much poetry in our time.
Milosz's work is full of surprise and irony, and can suddenly wake the reader to a sense of revelation in delight.
I have not even in this review begun to hint at the riches of this incredibly wonderful book of poems - poems of a great poet indeed.

Milosz came highly recommended: by Anna Akhmatova, Irina Ratushinskaya and Joseph Brodsky! (I even think that I read that Pasternak was a fan late in life!)

The cover blurb says that he contains the twentieth century within himself like no other poet, and this certainly is true. But this is not primarily "historical" poetry. It covers deep issues, but remains intensely honest, open, personal, experiential and biblically spiritual. Having said all of that, I don't do Milosz's poetry justice. It is not there for anybody's encyclopedic curiosity of "honest Christian experience". It is a scalpel that cuts open his own heart, and mine. Repeatedly. Clearly. Without descending into the self-consciously avant-garde. He opens me in more ways than I sometimes think I want to be opened.

In the very last poem of this, the greatest collection of Milosz's works, he so lucidly begins.......

Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.........

******************

This wonderful collection spans a lush and lavish 70 long years; years magically molded in the hands of a cunning and capable and wise prophet of our times.
Milosz yearns for a 'tangible reality' to maintain the health of poetry. He is accessible even to the untrained ear.....for it is ultimately in the lack of illusion that his work shines and reverberates.

In his introduction, he concludes that "poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries."

And we see this simple humility reflected in the last verses of his final poem of this collection.
*************************

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

**************************************

This rich collection will transport you back and forth in time with a gifted, yet humble master of distillation, distance and destiny!

Few poets have as eloquently and profoundly mapped out the manic contours of the twentieth century as have Czeslaw Milosz. And even fewer poets have truly lived through what they wrote. In both categories, Milosz stands as a towering giant, a massive oak which has weathered the most savage of storms and the sweetest of sunshines. Anyone interested in walking along the trial and tribulation-filled path of the last century would be wise to pick up this ultimate testament to Milosz's life and work.

This tome covers the entire expanse of Milosz's writing career, from his early years in Lithuania, where he followed the Frnech symbolists in writing image-dense lyrics, to his twilight years in Berkeley and Krakow, where his majestic voice evolved into that of a prophet's. Each poem exudes the light and darkness of the various stations along his life. Young student in Vilnius, journalist in pre-war Warsaw, the contemplative and distanced survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, the awe-struck immigrant never quite at home in his new land. All of these stops are painted with a wry and mediatative hand. Milosz's work is that of the thinker. His mind soars above the peaks and abysses of his life, well-distanced from the churning seas of emotion. He never delves into the passion of the moment, into the realm of the subjective. Milosz spent his childhood years wanting to be a naturalist and his objective, scientist-like perspective dominates throughout his work. In the Miloszian world, we are all parts of a much greater whole, our individual tears and spurts of temporary joy matter little in the grand picture of things. And it is this global picture that Milosz attempts to put down on the canvas. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the physical world is Milosz's favorite backdrop, and even when it appears absent, it's scent is still traceable. His formative years spent in the wilds of Lithuania gave him a fatalistic faith in the indestructible permanence of things, that no doubt helped him endure the hell of WW II Poland.

While detachement is Milosz's telltale signature, our human presence in the machine of history is really what these poems attempt to divulge. Like his country, Milosz experienced firsthand two totalitarian beasts, that of Nazi Germany and of Soviet Russia. Yet, Milosz's credo is not one of naive heroism, as is much in Polish poetry. His message is far more universal with its 'human, all too human' colors. For him, the true heros were those who managed to survive, to exist and to stubbornly hold on to some semblance of human dignity whilst all around bestiality reigned. The boy on the barricades of Warsaw who died nameless and faceless, this is the best we can do. Milosz avoids pointing the finger at the big beasts themselves, but instead asks us to examine our hearts. 'Did you really need to plunge into an abyss, To compose systems rather than settling into the fairy tale.'

Milosz's later poems carry the weight of a life lived through extraordinary circumstances. A life neither excessively noble nor excessively evil. Milosz's writes of and for the survivor, for most of us, who reach life's end with a complex mesh of guilt and content. 'I feel relief thinking I was no better and no worse than many, and that together with them I wait for forgiveness.' Like Shakespeare before him, Milosz's lasting message is one of humility before our sad condition, before our sad history, and most of all, before our merciful Maker. The hardest of lessons, but also the most important.

The best poems say with words that which can't be said with words. I know that sounds like double-talk, but it's true. The best poems act as catalysts, creating emotions and connections in us that the words taken by themselves just don't convey. For example, veteran poet Mary Oliver's poem "Rain" (the first in her "New and Selected Poems, Volume One") opens with "All afternoon it rained, then / such power came down from the clouds / on a yellow thread, / as authoritative as God is supposed to be. / When it hit the tree, her body / opened forever." Beautiful, profound, and any attempt at explanation effectively kills the poetry.
Mary Olver's poems are like that: clear imagery, simple language, common themes brought together like "power . . . on a yellow thread" that packs a wallop. How's THIS for a brightly-lit thought: "Is the soul solid, like iron? / Or is it tender and breakable, like / the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?"
And this seasoned poet has a few observations about life to share with us: "You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."
I've already ordered her "New and Selected Poems, Volume Two."

Mary Oliver is without a doubt one of America's finest poets! I think her keen observations of nature and of life are wonderfully rich and satisfying. This book was given to me as a gift--and by now I have bought every thing else she has ever written. I also buy this book as a gift for friends--and hope they will find the discovery of Oliver as rewarding as I have. I am also delighted that Mary Oliver is still very much alive--and hopefully still writing.

These poems will transport you into a world of peace and tranquility. You will reach into your soul and discover truths...some you had forgotten and some that you never knew that you had. Mary Oliver's poems are a voyage in self-discovery. Enjoy the ride!

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets and she did not diappoint with her work here. With each line, it is like I am being fed an exotic dessert, it awakens all of my senses to something new.

Here is a book with a soul. Read these poems out loud, slowly. Let the music resonate between your ears. Linger on each line. Let each stanza stand alone. Who but Mary Oliver can ask:

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?

Oliver will take you to places light and dark, hopeful and hopeless, and you will remember them for a long time.

i have not read any of these books but p dogg is my english teacher

I like potry. This book has great rime and meter. I remember when my Uncle Liam from Ireland came over, he brought me a huge bottle of wisky and a case of Mickeys Big Mouth, that Uncle Liam was always three sheets to the wind, I think it runs in the genes, after all, look at me, hck! Uncle Liam and me went to the woodshed with all that good stuff, we had a very pleasant time....

I was absolutely blown away by the caliber of this book. Brian Pinsker has a way with words that is truly brilliant. He can evoke many different portraits within the minds' eye with a simple twist of phrase. Jay Passer also is inspired, although his is a different, more harshly provocative style. I enjoyed this work thoroughly, and consider myself very fortunate to have been able to take a glimpse, through their written word, into both authors' thoughts.

The poetic pair of Pinsker and Passer pen yet another epic opus! Pinsker starts us out with some of the bizarrest metering I've ever read, expounding upon his adherence to the B'ahai Faith through his H. Rap Brown-inspired rhyme scheme. His Seattle street-style adaptation of the Cornish "Mmph -Kaph-Kaph-Hmm-Mmm" is one of the most sullenly beautiful pieces I've ever read. The second half consists of Passer's more conventional, yet equally beautiful Dickinsonian poetry. I hope that Passer brings back Jeremy Surbrook in the future -- he really lends a lot to Passer's poetry. All in all, a fine book.

Brian Pinsker's poetry dazzled and amazed and bemused me. This is a man who speaks and writes the language of the street. He blends and combines elements of H. Rap Brown, Public Enemy, Shakespeare, Rilke, Rumi, and the Pope. Totally cool!

This book of poems uses an extraordinary use of vocab that helps the writing pieces come to life...With stories full of heart warmth and stories full of tragedy, this book contains poems for any feelings one might have. A great book...not that expensive...i surely do not regret reading it.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It gives an insight to a time in our world that is usually surrounded in negativity. I found the heartfelt emotions of the author to be very refreshing and moving. I loved the poems about the waitresses as well, it's good to know what men really think as they sit alone in diners across the country. I recommend this collection to all who need new input into a world that has been closed to us.

Never before have I read a book that I can relate to more and keep coming back to on a daily basis that has made my life better! Thank You for helping me keep hope alive.

Thank you Joe Hertel.

I found this work by accident, lucky me. this book is insightful, showing those of us who have known no war what loss can feel like on many different levels. The narrative at the end of the poetry shows how things can change just that quickly. the ability to peer inside someone's mind doesn't come along to often; i am happy to have stumbled upon this work of poetry and prose. it has opened my eyes just that much wider to the world.
I CAN'T RECOMMEND IT MORE!

An emotional, moving siloque of love and war, its aftermath and innocence lost. Through his poems, Mr. Hertel has gotten to the core of why it is so important to look for peace, love and understanding in this world.

In the late 1970s, when the Mets really hit the skids and the Yankees got good again, it became necessary, if you were a kid in the Tri- State
area, to at least watch the Yankees, perhaps even to grudgingly root for them.  Forced into this spiritually untenable position, I chose to only
root for the scrubs, which made Cliff Johnson my favorite player.  I'll never forget the game where he tagged a pitch and Phil Rizzuto started
screaming that : "That one's outta here", bringing joy to the heart of every Heatchliff fan, only to have his towering popup caught by the
second baseman.  

"The Scooter" was easy to laugh at, with his myriad phobias, his propensity for saying unintentionally offensive things about minorities, his
tendency to leave the ballpark early when the Yankees were home, etc. But then there began appearing in The Village Voice a most
remarkable feature : verbatim text from Scooter's broadcasts rendered as poetry. We were suddenly confronted with the frightening prospect
that Scooter was not only making sense, but serving up literature, even profundity. Consider the wisdom, about baseball and about life [....]

As it turns out, this kind of exercise even has a name, it's called "found poetry." The Rizzuto poems are as good as any I've seen[...].

At any rate, this book is a hoot and once you read it you'll never again think of Rizzuto as just a good glove man, nor listen to a baseball
broadcast without noticing the frequently poetic nature of the announcer's line of patter.

GRADE : A

This literary gem is destined to be handed down from parent to child for generations to come.

Long before there was politics, or correctness, there was Phil Rizzuto. Rizzuto ably scoops up the essense of morality and ethics and fires to first with more deftness than Shakespeare, or that guy from Ireland (I can't remember his name--not Joyce, though; it was somebody else.) The poem we always relate and remember around the old campfire--when we go camping, and we have a fire, is the story Scooter tells in the honored oral tradition of Homer: of live-trapping squirrels in his attic and then letting them loose somewhere over by Yogi's house.

No doubt Rizzuto will forever be linked to the other great American Poets: Frost, Angelou, and Walden.

Some people are good at laying down sacrifice bunts, and some people are good at poetry. But nowadays so few people excel at both. Phil Rizzuto is that rare double-threat, and that's why this book is essential for anyone who likes bunts or poems.

My only complaint is that the editors have left out my all-time favorite Rizzuto moment, which was the time circa 1980 when Rizzuto and Frank Messer spent part of a day game discussing whether or not gorillas can swim. The answer proved elusive, but I have since learned that they can.

For me, nothing better epitomizes my age of baseball innocence than falling in love with the WPIX broadcasts of Phil Rizzuto, Frank Messer and Bill White during the late 1970s. This offbeat collection of the Scooter's unintentional poetry in his broadcasts is a graphic illustration of why Rizzuto was a true joy in the broadcast booth even if he wasn't a professional in the Mel Allen-Red Barber mold. I loved the format so much that I've actually reviewed the hundreds of old Yankee radio and telecast tapes in my collection searching for supplements to the collected verse of the Scooter and have found enough that could fill a sequel volume. Thanks to Seely and Pyer for this wonderful collection that no Yankee fan should be without.

Even though it's a short book, a little bit goes a long way with this kind of thing. Use in moderation.

Plus, I miss Bill White's good-natured chuckling.

Still, these "poems" are pretty good at bringing back long-gone hot summer nights.

Heard this story as a child from my grandparents who were on German background. This story is just like they told it. Beautiful illustrations complete the story that swirled in my head so many years ago!!

Ok.I HAVE NOT READ THIS BOOK.I hope that you don`t hurt my reviews for this,but in a way,I HAVE read this book.I am in this play,so I have read this script.And since the play is going to be on Saturday,(5th) and Sunday(6th) and also for the next weekend,I have to read this script over and over and over again.I think that this book is a very good book.In the play I am Miss Applebee but I think that this book is very good it must be.

When I was about seven-years-old a family member gave me a recording, (78s) of the Pied Piper of Hamelin narrated by Ingrid Bergman. As I listened, I could see the characters in my head and never tired of the story.

A month ago I bought the book for my eight-year-old granddaughter who lives about eight hundred miles away from me, because I was afraid with the passing of one more generation, the story might be forgotten.

It is a lovely book, written by Robert Browning more than a century ago. The drawings are perfect, given the dated language used in this book. And the story has a simple message, about honoring our promises.

Sadly, my granddaughter glanced at the book and was clearly not interested. I wanted to read it with her, intending to make clear the English used by Browning.

So, a tale almost twelve hundred years old bit the dust, at least in our family it did.

But if you are a lover of this fable, it is worth your time to try it out on the children in your family. They will be the richer for it.

This book would be a wonderful treasure for the pictures alone. Kate Greenaway, noted children's illustrator, has created a magical world of beautiful children, innocent faces, and romantic, nostalgic costumes. The colors on these pages are breathtaking, and the details (although Greenaway is always faulted for not drawing hands and feet well) are superb. This story is not for very young children, as it contains some troublesome themes. For the older child, perhaps 7+, the story might provoke some interesting post-read family discussions about honesty, trust, and the actual state of the children at the end of the tale. This is even a beautiful book to give to adults, as the messages about human nature can be appreciated on a deeper level.

"Rats!
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats."

Robert Browning (1812-1889) first published his poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin, A Child's Story" in 1842, based on an old German legend which may or may not have had some basis in historical fact. Browning was a serious poet; even in a poem filled with playful rhymes written specifically for children, he did not "dumb down" his language, but expected his readers to do a little work in understanding some of his "big words."

Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) was one of the most famous and popular illustrators of children's literature in the latter part of the 19th Century. She had grown up loving Browning's poem, and shortly before his death she requested and received his permission to republish it accompanied by her own illustrations. This edition was initially published in 1888 under the imprint of George Routledge & Sons, which was at that same time in the process of splitting between Routledge and Frederick Warne. Starting in 1889 all subsequent editions carried the Warne imprint. The book continued to be popular, and Frederick Warne has issued reprints from time to time, well into the late 20th Century. This Warne edition is not in print at present, but used copies with various reprint dates are available from Amazon Marketplace sellers.

However, two different reprint editions are currently available, each with the complete original text and illustrations, and each presented with loving care from an eminently respectable publisher, in well-made but modestly priced editions. The Dover reprint (ISBN 0486296199) is full-size, in a sturdy paperback; the Alfred A Knopf/Borzoi/Everyman's Library reprint (ISBN 0679428127) is part of their Children's Classics series, in a very sturdily constructed hardcover with sewn sections that will not crack with use, but the page size is somewhat smaller. Both are beautiful books, and either is an excellent value.

As noted in the Editorial Reviews above, there have been other editions of "The Pied Piper," with different illustrations, and at least one seems to have been issued with the poem itself "retold" to make the language simpler; neither of those reviews is discussing this original version. Some readers may prefer one or another of these different versions. But anyone wanting to stick with Browning's original full text and Greenaway's original charming, muted and subtle illustrations should choose between the Dover or the Everyman's, or visit Amazon's Marketplace sellers to look for a copy of the Frederick Warne.