Irish-American Books

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.

Anyone who likes to recite poetry out loud or get others to recite it will find this collection of 100 poems a special treat. It is attractively laid out in a square page shape--the height of a regular paperback, but a little wider. On every page there are interesting notes about the poem in the margin--everythng from how it ties in with oral storytelling and poetic traditions to the use of rhythm, rhyme meter, and language, The user friendly notes zero in especially on aspects of the poem that are important for oral delivery without bogging down the reader. The poem lines are double-spaced for easy reading. The selection of poems ranges from childhood rhymes to literary classics by such poets as Lewis Caroll, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Ogden Nash, and Rudyard Kipling. The styles include love poems, limericks, elegies, raps, ballads, and more; from Middle English to free verse, sonnets to satires, nonsense poetry to formalism, there is something to fit every budding poet's tastes. Even if you don't plan to use the poems for oral reading, the margin notes help you to appreciate the poems more fully in their use of language, sound, and literary traditions. To quote James Earl Jones in the introduction to the book, "In this "burst of verses," you will find fun and sorrow, stories and songs, whimsy and majesty." And a chance to explore how to bring them to life out loud.

Excellent quality. It was a text book needed for a college class.

I found this book to be an excellent review of the topic! The inclusion of modern day poets such as John Lennon, Tupac Shakur and Bob Dylan helps open up the topic and art of poetry to a wide audience.
The book is well researched, and concise reference lists are provided for each author to help students who want to delve deeper into the body of work of any of the included poets.

lyrical in its presentation...magisterial in its breadt

This is a great set for students who are looking for background information on popular authors and works they would be interested in reading today. I also have the set of Great American Writers and Great World Writers that compliment this set nicely. There are many great pictures throughout and volume 11 is a complete index.

This book tells the story of a young boy - Donál Long, a young Irish boy in the 1798 rebellion. I would highly recomend this book to anybody around the age of 10-13. If you enjoy this book, you should read the follow ups - The Slave Coast and The Cove Of Cork.

Award-winning author and poet John Knoepfle presents Prayer Against Famine & Other Irish Poems, a work that embraces his Irish roots and contemplates the human drive for survival in spite of terrible suffering. Compassion and tragedy intertwine in these brief, free-verse compositions that evoke a sanctity of the human spirit. Dancing with the Inupiaq: the man dancing on one foot / told us he did not know / where his songs came from / only that his grandmother sang them // we understood how it was with him / how the man at the desk and that one / skulking in the beloved fields / would tell him it did not matter // so we put on our gloves / and we all got up and danced / keeping time as well as we knew / and awkward as a room full of bears // learning how the inupiaq dance.