Poetry Books - Page 14

If I Ran the Zoo (Dr Seuss)

Dr. Seuss

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Dated 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The racist elements of the book are certainly not out of the ordinary for 1950. (And they're much milder than in Seuss's cartoons of the 1940s.) However, I think many parents, and not just "stuffed shirts", will prefer not to invite their children to laugh, for example, at the idea of people with "eyes that slant." (The phrase is given strong emphasis -- "slant" is a rhyme word.) Obviously, I'm going to discuss such things with my daughter when she's old enough, and teach her to assess them for herself when she reads. But now she's only three, and I prefer to pass on to another book.

Great for adults, too! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Purchased this book for a grandchild. I can only hope that whichever parent reads this to the child, they have as much fun as I did reading it to MY child. It IS fun--snuggle with your little one and start reading. Soon you will be both laughing. I believe the word "nerd" originated in this book.

Meh -- not our favorite 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This was a library book we brought home, and we did read through it twice. But it just wasn't our favorite. For one thing, I had to keep substituting "Amazing" for "Gol-darnedest" in the text -- the text's exclamations of wonder were ... a little too close to blasphemy for this Mommy.

Also, it ran a little long.

But it is fun to read it out loud, and the faster the better!

New and Selected Poems, Volume Two

Mary Oliver

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Mary Oliver is magical 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I have about 5 of her poetry books. I feel that her poetry has gotten more and more beautiful over time, and believe that this collection is better than Volume 1. Mary Oliver is definitely my favorite poet - much of her writing is about a thirst for growth and spirituality, and finding peace in nature and love (friendships and relationships). I have given this book to a number of friends, who are also touched by her gift of expressing the unexpressable. Some of my favorite poems in this book: the Percy series (her dog), Why I Wake Early, and The Whistler.

My other favorite book of Mary Oliver poems is her most recent one: "Thirst". It deals with grief at the lost of her long-time partner and is quite beautiful. For those looking for a really good book of poems in general, I *definitely* recommend "Good Poems," compiled by Garrison Keillor; and "Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Redemption" compiled by Roger Housden. Enjoy!

Editorial Review:

Mary Oliver has been writing poetry for nearly five decades, and in that time she has become America's foremost poetic voice on our experience of the physical world. This collection presents forty-two new poems—an entire volume in itself—along with works chosen by Oliver from six of the books she has published since New and Selected Poems, Volume One.

"Oliver's poetry is of the Earth, and about the Earth, and as these poems give voice to the planet, they render human life more beautiful, more sentient, more meaningful." —Karen McCarthy, ForeWord

Mary Oliver, the winner of numerous prizes, is one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America. Her works include New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon / 6877-9 / $16.00 pb) and At Blackwater Pond (Beacon / 0700-6 / $19.95 audio). She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
A P R I L

Gilgamesh: A New English Version

Stephen Mitchell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

And the Audio version is great, too. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I just finished the audio version of this wonderful book, and was transfixed, even though it was the third time I listened to it.

The explanation by the author made it far more valuable to me.

Though Gilgamesh is the oldest story available (but what about the Book of Job), it remains interesting today as Gilgamesh is also a "seeker," as we sometimes say today. Even though he had all that his society had to offer, including its female citizens, he had to learn something about life, religion and the universe.

epic wonder 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

not only the oldest, but one of the best stories ever told. gorgeous translation, and an unusual but compelling narrator. i never get tired of this production.

Editorial Review:

Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, but until now there has not been a version that is a superlative literary text in its own right. Acclaimed by critics and scholars, Stephen Mitchell's version allows us to enter an ancient masterpiece as if for the first time, to see how startlingly beautiful, intelligent, and alive it is.

Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza: Third Edition

Gloria Anzaldúa

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Racist Garbage 1 out of 5 stars.
16 of 55 people found this review helpful.

While most reviewers seem to be bent on lauding Gloria Anzaldúa's "insightful and progressive" writings, I can't help but take a different viewpoint. The vast majority of her essays, while cloaked in a sense of righteous equality, are quite simply racist drivel. She speaks of acceptance and tolerance for foreign cultures in America, and harps on the evils of correcting students when they use improper English, yet instills her writing with a blatant and offensive racism.

I make specific reference to the article "How to Tame A Wild Tongue". In her conclusion, she praises the perseverance and endurance of the mestizo race/culture, making reference to walking by "the crumbling ashes" of American civilization. An eagerness is felt to see the day that "white laws and commerce will rot in the desert". One would be hard pressed to come up with a more hypocritical conclusion. Here is an author preaching tolerance and acceptance of different languages and cultures throughout her entire article. She whines about the troubles she had fitting in with English speaking people. She goes in depth to explain the numerous bastardizations of Spanish that are spoken in various Hispanic cultures and tries to convince us of how each is a viable language, even so-called "Spanglish", just a blend of English and Spanish that you might hear in a high school Spanish I class ("el chairo = chair,la ceilingo = ceiling, etc.) . And after all that talk of acceptance, she ends by completely blasting American culture and expressing her wish to see it crumble to dust, while at the same time presenting the mestizo as the dominant race which will endure this fall. Talk about racist. I understand pride of your country and people, but this goes far beyond simple nationalism, especially in light of the overall message of the article. Tolerance is right out the window here.

Don't be fooled by Anzaldúa's overly wordy diction and pseudo-intellectualism. She is a flat out racist that for some reason is tolerated (forget that, praised to the roof!) in many academic circles. Her educational philosophy is naive, irresponsible, and fundamentally flawed. Hopefully her writings will soon fall out of the limelight.

Editorial Review:

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remapped our understanding of what a "border" is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This twentieth-anniversary edition features new commentaries from prominent activists, artists, and teachers on the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa's visionary work.

The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the nuts and bolts of craft to the sources of inspiration, this book is for anyone who wants to write poetry--and do it well. In this fortuitous collaboration, two spirited poets, themselves teachers of poetry, offer guidance to aspiring beginners and those who have already published. Brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing are each followed by distinctive writing exercises. ("Compare an actual family photograph with one that was never taken, but might have been.") The ups and downs of the writing life--including the inevitable visitations of self-doubt and writer's block--are here, along with tips about getting published. A special section contains twenty-minute writing exercises, and valuable appendixes cover further reading and marketing advice. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments. Numerous examples of contemporary poetry, chosen for relevance and freshness, illustrate salient points and stimulate the imagination. By calling on their own experience and focusing on living American writers for their models, the authors introduce you to poetry as it is right now.

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Walter Benjamin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Just a quick note 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I have nothing to add to the reviews below except to note for scholarly interest that the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' included in this collection is not Benjamin's final version. (Neither is this title a good translation of the German: 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit'. Zohn's translation in the selected writings is better: 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility'.) The text in this collection is the 1935 manuscript, as originally published in 1936; the text collected in the Selected Writings, Vol. 4 is the final 1939 version that, as far as I can tell, was not published in Benjamin's lifetime. The difference between the two texts is slight, consisting mainly of some additional sentences here and there and some changed words. At least one of these revisions is, I hypothesize, the result of Adorno's criticisms of his letter to Benjamin of 18 Mar 1936.

Otherwise, for most purposes, this is the best collection of Benjamin's essays available for an introduction to his thought. This volume collects some of the best of his essays that are otherwise spread throughout the selected writings published by the Harvard U.P.

Editorial Review:

Studies on contemporary art and culture by one of the most original, critical and analytical minds of this century.

Grendel

John Gardner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 165 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Distrubed.... 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I'm disturbed by the amount of people bashing _Grendel_. It's simply an amazing novel. Perhaps those offering sour reviews simply misunderstand the novel--Gardner, from my reading, isn't really attempting a retelling of the _Beowulf_ story. Instead, he's attempting to cast a philosophical statement *against* a philosophical school of thought that was, and still is, gaining ground when Gardner wrote _Grendel_: existentialism and nihilism, which is embraced by the dragon. Gardner just uses the Beowulf story to frame this social commentary. Consider Gardner's philosophical statement: in a time in history when so many were and are embracing the pointlessness of life, Gardner tells us that there is meaning and real in the world around us. Beowulf smashes Grendel into the wall when they finally meet and forces him to sing walls to prove to Grendel that there is meaning and that reality does exist. And what does Grendel do? He sings walls and sees a different kind of dragon. Grendel, throughout that whole novel, searches for something real, something that carries meaning, and Beowulf becomes that. People read this novel and think it's depressing--it's not. In the end there's hope. Yeah, we know Beowulf is going to die, but before he does, he's going to accomplish great things, and there will be other great rulers after him.

If you're looking for an action story, stick with _Beowulf_. But if you're looking for a philosophical novel to controvert the overwhelming onslaught of postmodernism and beliefs that we're in the world all by ourselves and should find gold and "sit on it" as the dragon tells Grendel, _Grendel_ is one of the finest craftings written to date.

Perhaps those who would denigrate _Grendel_ simply do not understand its intent; it's intent isn't to entertain you; it's intent is to teach you and force you to question. And on those grounds, it's really hard to argue that it's not a fantastic book.

Editorial Review:

When Grendel is drawn up from the caves under the mere where he lives with his bloated, inarticulate hag of a mother into the fresh night air, it is to lay waste Hrothgar's meadhall and heap destruction on the humans he finds there. What else can he do? For he is not like the men who busy themselves with God, love and beauty. He sees the infuriating human rage for order and recognises the meaninglessness of his own existence. GRENDEL is John Gardner's masterpiece; it vividly reinvents the world of Beowulf. In Grendel himself, a creature of grotesque comedy, pain and disillusioned intelligence, Gardner has created the most unforgettable monster fantasy.

The Romantic Dogs

Roberto Bolaño

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Editorial Review:

Discover Roberto Bolaño as he saw himself, in his own first calling as a poet. Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper's, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolaño's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...."

Metamorphoses

Ovid

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Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The first and still the best modern verse translation of the Metamorphoses, Humphries' version of Ovid's masterpiece captures its wit, merriment, and sophistication.

Everyone will enjoy this first modern translation by an American poet of Ovid's great work, the major treasury of classical mythology, which has perennially stimulated the minds of men. In this lively rendering there are no stock props of the pastoral and no literary landscaping, but real food on the table and sometimes real blood on the ground.

Not only is Ovid's Metamorphoses a collection of all the myths of the time of the Roman poet as he knew them, but the book presents at the same time a series of love poems--about the loves of men, women, and the gods. There are also poems of hate, to give the proper shading to the narrative. And pervading all is the writer's love for this earth, its people, its phenomena.

Using ten-beat, unrhymed lines in his translation, Rolfe Humphries shows a definite kinship for Ovid's swift and colloquial language and Humphries' whole poetic manner is in tune with the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet.

Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Landmarks of World Literature (New))

Winthrop Wetherbee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 84 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Not the complete Canterbury Tales 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Please note: The Bantam version (translated by Hieatt) only contains the most popular of the Tales. (Use the "Inside this Book" feature to check the table of contents, as I, alas, did not.) The facing page translation is just what I was looking for, but really wanted the complete set.

canterbury tale review 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

What would it be like if you had to make a very long journey on horse back? Pretty boring, right? But what if someone had the brilliant idea of telling stories on the way there? That would make the trip go a lot faster. This is the premise of the Canterbury Tales. There are a lot of people who all want to go to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. They all met at a pub when the pub owner said that they should all tell one story on the way there and one on the way back. The version of the Canterbury tales only consists of four of the one hundred twenty eight that were told.
The first story that is told by the Nun's priest. This story is about a poor widow who lives on a farm. As you get further in this story it starts retelling the story of a chicken and a hen. This chicken had many wonderful hens around him. "This noble rooster ruled over seven hens, whose work it was to please him. They were his sisters and his wives." (pg. 20) But there was one hen named Lady Pertelote that he liked the most. One night he had a dream about a fox eating him. The next morning he told Lady Pertelote and she thought it didn't mean anything. A couple of days later a fox tricked him to shut his eyes and then the fox snuck up behind him and snatched him in his mouth. He was saved by the widow.
The next person to tell was the pardoner. His story was about greed. There were three people who were searching for death because they heard of all the horrible things he had done and wanted to kill him. While on their way they met an old man who told the men, "If you're so anxious to find Death, turn up this crooked road. I left him in that grove, under a tree and there he'll stay." (pg. 41) So that's what they did. When they got there they saw a sack full of gold and decided not to chase after Death but take the gold by night. They decided for one of them to go into the city and get wine to celebrate. The person that went was the youngest of them all. While he was gone the two thought up a plan to kill the third one so that they only had to split the money between them. The third boy wanted the money all to himself so he poisoned two of the bottles of wine and left one free of poison for himself. As he got the tree the two men killed him and they celebrated by drinking the wine and they died too. In the end they all got there wish. They met Death.
Those two were my favorite and the next two are by the Wife of Bath and the Franklin. The wife of Bath is about a man who threatens the life of another if they don't tell him what women want. The franklin's tale is about women who loved a man who left her and she was very sad. Nothing could make her feel better. If you want to know what happens at the end of these stories you'll have to read the book.
Historically this book is very good. It is based in the year of 1386. It show the life style of people who lived in the middle ages. It taught me that not all people were rich back then. It is historically spot on but the thing about this book is because it was written in the middle ages all the living conditions are right but it's very whimsical. Chickens can't talk, and Death isn't a person. In a way it shows how people thought back then. It tells us that some people might have wanted to meet death. Maybe in a physical way because they wanted to die or they just wanted to see someone death took away from them.
The reason I liked this book was because of the old English. I like taking in the metaphors and deciphering it. If you like Shakespeare then you'll most likely like this book. It is very whimsical and magical. It shows the people in the middle ages in a very metaphorical way. This book shows how life can be mystical and great even when you don't except it.

Editorial Review:

Placing the Canterbury Tales in the context of the crisis in English society in the fourteenth century, this guide examines the social diversity of Chaucer's pilgrims, the stylistic range of their tales and psychological richness of their interaction. It emphasizes the language of the poem, as well as the role of Chaucer in literary tradition, and devotes an entire chapter to the General Prologue widely studied in undergraduate courses. Finally, the volume includes a chronology of the period and an invaluable guide to further reading. First Edition Hb (1989): 0-521-32331-2 First Edition Pb (1989): 0-521-31159-4