Irish-American Books

I found this book years ago in London and every person whose hands I have placed it in has returned it to me with a mischevious light in their eyes. Ms Macdonald is truly one of the greatest contemporary playwrights, both for women and for Scotland. Each of these four very different scripts provides a rich dialect and dialogue, embracing Scottish culture and revealing it in its naked honesty. A portrayal of women of every age, from the single mother to the hovering grandma, from the brutally truthful child to the impetuous, rebelling teenager. Each story is humorous and cruel; my heart breaks with understanding as Morag tells her only daughter that she hates her, and loves her in practically the same moment. I cannot conceive of how Ms Macdonald has managed to capture the words which express so perfectly a kind of pain that all women deal with - and I must add here that the men in her plays are just as powerful. These scripts provide a richness of modern Scottis! h life and the women, the families, the people who struggle to survive and discover what "it all" really means. If you have found your way to this review please do yourself a favor and read Sharman. She'll say it like you've never heard it before - think Career Girls or Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh). If you are an actor you will find her plays to be a terrific fountain of material; if you are a woman, I can bet you won't find many stories that strike closer to the soul.

This collection of poetry from Chaucer to the modern poets has been with me for twenty years and still provides inspiration. While there are many famous poems in it, the editor's intent seems to be also to show the diversity of various poets' styles, and to choose based on quality rather than popularity. My father, an avid reader of poetry, has been trying to steal my copy for a long time! Many good vocabulary notes are provided.

The essential book on Scotlands most famous and favouritre son in large and easy to read print.

Based on her theosophic and new thought principles, these poems had tremendous influence on helping people to come into a sense of personal power and independence. Truly a most inspirational woman!

Under this cover all of Ella's sweetest and most sentimental love poems are collected. Not for everyone's taste but if you love a good love poem, you will enjoy this collection immensely.

This Poetic interpretation of Psalms is truly a delight. Thanks for making it available!

Morrison's timely post-Marxist screed comments sagely upon a variety of contemporary critical debates. Those familiar with the polymathic cultural critic's briefer interventions will not despise this, his first sustained engagement with Modernism's embryonic (and full-blown) fascist affinities. Those who fashionably scorn and/or valorize Modernist pieties, or who rest secure in the "knowledge" that the Modernist trajectory has trailed off the cultural radar screen, will find much to raise hackles here. If, like a PoMo Pilate, you find yourself questioning Truth, but not staying for an answer, you'll really relate to the characters in this book, and you'll hate when it ends. There's some unnecessary talk about a guy called "Ideology," and frankly offensive references to a brother named "DeMan," but the true-to-life characterizations of the protagonists and visual descriptions of settings carry the reader through and make this page-turner impossible to put down. I hope Morrison keeps up writing like this, and I will recommend this book to all my co-workers.

Ellman's book is one I return to as I teach Eliot and Pound. Her work is powerfully, and usefully, illuminating, especially in its examination of the interrelation between (aspects of) theory and literature. I especially admire her use of Freud and Bataille in her reading of "The Waste Land" (via the notions of the "uncanny" and the "abject"). Her readings do in fact read the poems instead of enacting the masturbatory fantasies that academics can sometimes fall prey to. This is an unjustly unknown book: Ellman's critical intelligence is staggering.

This book is worth its weight in gold. It is worth more than all the self-help-how-to-write-poetry books put together.

Orr writes of the poetry of survival with complete authority. He knows what he's talking about, having suffered a psychic wound early in childhood when he accidentally killed his little brother in a hunting accident. Orr writes: "To say that I was horrified and traumatized by the event is only to state the obvious." The point, says Orr, is that his writing got him beyond the horror and the paralysis.

What sets this book apart from the "how-to's" and the "can-do's" is Orr's emphasis on excellence: In other words, it isn't enough to have a psychic wound and to write about it--great writing comes about only through a careful and (usually) long apprenticeship.

The first half of the book explains the psychology of writing and healing. Orr's writing is thoughtful and engaging. He has the ability to explain complex concepts in a way that is easy for the reader to understand. For instance, in explaining the "self," Orr writes: "The self, in my image, is like a tiny island in a vast sea of chaos, and it's also like those conch shells you lift to your ear to hear the ocean's roar: the chaos of the sea is inside the self also." Throughout, Orr seeks to explain how writing can give order to the seemingly chaotic life.

The second half of the book deals with writers of the personal lyric, focusing on early practitioners like Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman. In addition, in his thoroughly engaging way, Orr writes of several poets as being his "heroes." In doing so, amazingly, he humanizes them, makes them real people rather than the marble statues they seem to be in poetry anthologies. Other poets he discusses are: Plath, Roethke, Dickinson, Keats, and Wilfred Owen.

One of my favorite revelations in the book was Orr's brief discussion of the Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz, whose "In the Middle of Life" portrays, in Orr's words, "a shell-shocked, traumatized veteran who must relearn everything from scratch and through elementary incantatory repetitions."

As a university lecturer, and as someone who is familiar with literary criticism, I find that often in classrooms the writer's original and personal motivations for writing are erased from consideration. Works are often come to as though they are cadavers, opened and probed objectively on a slab. Orr, in contrast, brings poets and their poems fully alive. The experience of reading this book was thoroughly rewarding.

I highly recommend this book. It is a great companion to DeSalvo's WRITING AS A WAY OF HEALING: HOW TELLING OUR STORIES TRANSFORMS OUR LIVES.

Wonderful book! Great art, excellent selection of poetry, and a great way to introduce a classic art form to a generation that generally requires a more "visual" stimuli. Perfect for anyone from 8 to 80.