Finding My Elegy, by Ursula K. Le Guin

It is always interesting when you discover that an author you enjoy for one type of writing also writes in other forms. For many fiction writers, this second form seems to be poetry. Wendell Berry and John Updike, though better known for fiction, are fine poets, and I was pleased to discover while browsing the new books here that Ursula K. Le Guin, whose fiction has been a favorite of mine for years, is also an eloquent poet who has been writing poems for over 50 years. This collection brings together some of Le Guin’s best poetry from 1960-2010.

Like her prose, Le Guin’s poetry is carefully made and reflects a joy in words and ideas. Her poems are precise and crystalline, and there does not seem to be a word used that was not carefully chosen and thoughtfully placed. Le Guin writes equally well about nature (“Wild Oats and Fireweed”) and about the world of the mind (“Learning Latin in Old Age”).

There are some themes that resurface throughout the collection. Loss—of friends and family, places, and abilities—is a recurrent theme, particularly in some of the later poems, but it is balanced by a palpable joy in living that is apparent in even the darkest moments in Le Guin’s verse. The roles of women too are studied here—daughter, wife, lover, mother, Maenad or shepherdess.  These are themes that Le Guin has explored in her fiction as well, and it is fascinating to see them here distilled to poetry.

If you only know Ursula K. Le Guin as a fiction writer, you should have a look at these poems as well, and if you are not familiar with her writing at all, the poems here are a fine place to make her acquaintance.

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An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Wes Davis

Irish writer Seamus Heaney is one of my favorite modern poets, and I have also found much to enjoy in the work of some of the earlier 20th century Irish poets, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice in particular. So as I was browsing the poetry collection here, I was delighted to come across this anthology of modern Irish poets. I have discovered here a wealth of new writers to read.

There are poems here about the Troubles and about the history of the Irish people, but what mostly strikes me as I read through these poems is the love of language that seems to be the hallmark of all of the poets here. Here is an example:

She pushed the hair out of her eyes with
her free hand and put the bucket down.

The zinc-music of the handle on the rim
Tuned the evening

(from Eavan Boland’s “The Achill Woman”)

I love the phrase “zinc-music.”

And another:

I saw magic on a green country road–
That old woman, a bag of sticks her load,

Blackly down to her thin feet a fringed shawl,
A rosary of bone on her horned hand,

(from Michael Harnett’s “Thirteen Sonnets”)

This is a substantial collection with over 900 pages of poems, from over 50 poets. The poems here are all in English, though some were translated from Gaelic, and each poet’s section begins with a short, but thorough introduction to the author and his or her work. If you have any interest in the poetry of Ireland this is a indispensable collection.

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To Be Read in 500 Years, by Albert Goldbarth

I was introduced to Albert Goldbarth through his wonderful poem “Library” (thanks Neil!), that describes what various books have done for and to Goldbarth and others in the course of their existence. It starts off  with “This book saved my life” and proceeds through “This is a book of prohibitions; this other, a book of rowdy license. They serve equally to focus the prevalent chaos of our lives” and “This book is guarded around the clock by men in navy serge and golden braiding, carrying very capable guns” to “This book is going to save the world.”

Goldbarth delights in words, and his poems draw the reader into that delight. He also invests his poems with much humor, though these are by no means light verse. The poems here are frequently long, do not rhyme, and often appear dense on the page. But once you get into them, the way Goldbarth plays with language can leave you breathless. He seemingly effortlessly combines personal stories with bits and pieces of facts about everything from the Bible and literature to physics and the natural sciences. He revels in unusual words and made-up words and in “imperfect knowledge.” He can also be pretty blunt about sexuality, as he notes in “The Singing,” “I have (as colleague X once said) an offensively salty mouth.”

Nonetheless, Goldbarth’s poems are worth the effort of close reading. He plays with words the way a good horn player plays with the notes in a jazz tune. You start off thinking you are listening to an old standard, but by the end you see the piece in a new way. Goldbarth’s poetry opens up new vistas and very well may be being read “in 500 years.”

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Without, by Donald Hall

Two Aprils ago, I wrote about poet Jane Kenyon’s last book, Otherwise. Today’s post is her husband Donald Hall’s moving and powerful collection of poems about Kenyon’s illness, death, and the days and months following, as Hall begins life without her.

Hall is a superb poet, and I have always enjoyed his writing, grounded in the New England granite where Hall lives on his family’s farm. His poems are earthy, substantial pieces, that move easily from the personal to the universal.

Here is one of my favorites, “Ox Cart Man,” and another, “Mt. Kearsarge Shines.”

The poems in Without reflect Hall’s deep grief over the illness and death of Jane Kenyon: ”Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony” (“Midwinter Letter”). At the same time, they move with grace to explore the necessity of living with that grief, and the possibility of doing so.

These are not easy poems, but no one said that reading poetry (or reading anything else for that matter) should be easy. They are, however, important poems to read as we try to make sense of the human condition, and that is what all of our reading does for us.

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Good Poems, American Places, ed. Garrison Keillor

It is poetry month, and this week, Blogging for a Good Book will look at several books of poetry, both anthologies and works of individual poets. We hope that you will take some time this month to read a poem or two. Read them aloud, as poetry is meant to be heard not just read. And if you are ambitious, try to memorize a poem or two: here are some good ones to start with.

Through his Writer’s Almanac programs on public radio, Garrison Keillor has done a great deal to refresh poetry’s place in American letters (at least for those who listen to NPR). His programs each morning conclude with a poem. In selecting his poems, Keillor goes for pieces that express “a little humanity” and that will not send readers away feeling that they have just encountered “a puzzle with no right answers.”

Springing from the Writer’s Almanac, Keillor has edited several anthologies of outstanding poems, old and new. In Good Poems, American Places, Keillor has sought out poems with a strong sense of place; poems that take the reader somewhere, be it Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Central Park (“Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West”), Sarah Freligh’s Tonawanda (“City of Tonawanda Softball Championship”), May Sarton’s “Monticello,” or Donald Hall’s Mt. Kearsarge (“Mt. Kearsarge Shines”). Additionally, there are poems that explore more intimate, private space—the farm fields plowed by Joyce Sutphen’s father (“H”) or John Haag’s resting place of a ’37 Chevy pickup (“Homesteader”).

Keillor has a fine ear for verse, and his selections here represent some of the best American poetry around. The collection includes a mix of well-known writers—Billy Collins, Maxine Kumin, Charles Wright—as well as many poets new to me whose work I look forward to exploring.

America is truly present in this book, in the hard work that is done in the factories and farms, in the constant movement from city to rural land, in the bright lights and dark spaces, and in the births and deaths and the in-betweens of the people in these poems. Good Poems, American Places is a superb collection for anyone interested in poetry or America.

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Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T.S. Eliot

To continue last week’s leitmotif of books of cat poetry, I have gone back to what many people consider the original and the best. Rather than a series of poems from the cats’ own perspective, like I Could Pee on This, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a series of narratives and how-tos about cats. It was first published in 1939 and has been in print ever since. Our library owns several versions with black and white drawings. We also have a winsomely illustrated version with only three of the poems called Growltiger’s Last Stand.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats is based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. I have never seen the musical and can’t quite picture how it would work as a musical, but I know it was hugely popular on the stage and is available at our library to borrow on DVD.

In some circles T.S. Eliot is most famous for his serious poetry like “The Waste Land” or “The Hollow Men.” Many students of English literature are familiar with these poems (willingly or not). And many of these same students of literature are surprised that the mind that produced the dark and cynical lines of his serious poems could also produce his light and lilting poems about cats.
Compare this gem from “The Waste Land”:

“I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.”

And from “The Hollow Men”:

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

To the rollicking:

Macavity’s a mystery cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw –
For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the flying sqad’s despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime — Macavity’s not there!

And

Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were a very notorious couple of cats.
As knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians, tight-rope walkers and acrobats

T.S. Eliot’s skill and dexterity with language show through in both cases, lilting or dark. These are great read-aloud poems that roll off the tongue. Some of our copies of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats are shelved in the children’s section, and the poems are certainly suitable for and loved by children, but I also recommend them for cat lovers and lovers of language.

Check the WRL catalog for Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

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I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats, by Francesco Marciuliano

In ancient Egypt

We cats were gods

We ruled the heavens…

So kneel before me

I have long suspected that cats are utterly self-centered and only interested in their human companions for what the felines can finagle out of them.  I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats proves it!

This little book is told from the point of view of various cats.  The poems often start with an enchanting description of normal cattishness, with a surprising twist:

Sometimes when I lie on your warm chest /  And wonder, ‘Who is that?’

Just in case all the cat lovers out there accuse me of slander (and perhaps even that I may be a dog person) I asked three fat cats of my acquaintance what they thought of the book.  Mushroom and Pimpernel sniffed it hopefully, I suspect for food.  Bandit was a bit more proactive and tried to bite it and then batted it with his paw. But all three are shocked at such a slur on their characters.  Or, at least they would be if they had time to consider it -  if it wasn’t time for food, or maybe a nap, or maybe to chase the long-suffering dog’s tail…

If you need a fun little book to brighten up these winter days, I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats could be just the thing to make you laugh out loud.  It is illustrated throughout with dozens of cat photos, many with extreme awwww qualities.  It may be a bit late to gift this book for the holiday season, but bear it in mind for special occasions for the cat-lovers in your life as it captures the utter and complete, but endearing, selfishness of cats.

Check the WRL catalog for I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats

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New Collected Poems, by Wendell Berry

I have written several posts here about the novels and short fiction of Wendell Berry. While I treasure these stories and go back to them for sustenance, I also have found great satisfaction in reading Berry’s poetry. This recently published collection is a great place to start if you are new to Berry as a poet.

The themes that Berry explores in his fiction—community, the connections between people and the land, nature, the struggles to maintain a small farm, religion and spirituality, and redemption—are further developed in these poems. The settings for many of the poems are the same Kentucky woods, farms, fields, and small towns that are so present in Berry’s fiction. The poems distill the longer works, offering the reader the essence of Berry’s thoughts. As any great poet does, and he is indeed a great poet, Berry moves from the particular to the universal, illuminating our lives through his own experience. The about two hundred poems collected here reflect Berry’s published works from 1964 to the present.

Here is one of my favorites, “Burley Coulter’s Song for Kate Helen Branch.” Here, Berry’s elegiac tone is conveyed in language that weaves and winds like a fiddle playing in some lonesome hollow.

The rugs were rolled back to the wall
The band in place, the lamps all lit.
We talked and laughed a little bit
And then obeyed the caller’s call
Light-footed, happy, half-entranced-
To balance, swing, and promenade.
Do you remember how we danced
And how the fiddler played?

About midnight we left the crowd
And wandered out to take a stroll.
We heard the treefrogs and the owl;
Nearby the creek was running loud.
The good dark held us as we chanced
The joy we two together made,
Remembering how we’d whirled and pranced
And how the fiddler played.

That night is many years ago,
And gone, and still I see you clear,
Clear as the lamplight in your hair
The old time comes around me now,
And I remember how you glanced
At me, and how we stepped and swayed.
I can’t forget the way we danced,
The way the fiddler played.

If you enjoy Wendell Berry’s fiction, you should give his poetry a try. If you have never read Berry, you could do worse than to start with this excellent collection.

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Exiles, by Ron Hansen

A discussion with a friend about the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins brought to my attention Ron Hansen’s exploration of the intersection of spirituality and creativity, Exiles. Hansen’s book is a fictional memoir of both the noted Jesuit poet Hopkins who died in 1889 at the age of 55, and of five German nuns, who died along with a number of other emigrants when their ship the Deutschland was sunk off the English coast in 1875.

Hopkins had abandoned writing poetry after entering the Jesuits, but the foundering of the ship and in particular the death of the five nuns spurred him to resume writing, and the subsequent poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is one of Hopkins’s finest and most challenging pieces. The novel alternates between Hansen’s fictional account of Hopkins’s life as a Jesuit, which sticks close to the historical biography, and his telling of the lives of each of the five nuns, building in this case from a sparse historical record. In both instances, the reader comes to appreciate the sense of being outsiders that all of these characters felt. They were all truly exiles in one way or another.

Hansen writes about spiritual issues without ever becoming mawkish or saccharine. He has a gift for language as well, and the voices of the English and Irish Jesuits and the German nuns ring with equal verisimilitude. Hansen also has a deep understanding of and an obvious affection for Hopkins’s sometimes thorny poetry. The heart of the book is an examination of the challenge of choosing to go where you are called, whether this means leaving your place of birth for a new land, as with the nuns, or leaving your faith and family as Hopkins did in converting to Roman Catholicism. Readers who enjoy the nonfiction of writers such as Kathleen Norris (Cloister Walk) or Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird) might also enjoy Hansen’s richly spiritual fiction.

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Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt

Today’s blog is written by John from Circulation.

April, which was also “National Poetry Month,” had me thinking about my favorite poets. Of those I love, and there are many, my two personal giants are Homer and Shakespeare. Homer made an ancient world forever new with glorious words, even though he probably never knew how to read or write. Shakespeare dragged the world into a new way of thinking, even though he himself had little formal education and never attended university. His facility with words amazes me. Many scholars think most of us can get by on a vocabulary of about 9,000 words. Shakespeare’s vocabulary exceeded 28,000 words. Of course, that is because he seems to have felt quite at ease in inventing new words! April 23, 2012 marked Shakespeare’s 448 birthday. That such an eminent poet’s birthday occurs in the midst of “National Poetry Month” makes sense. That it is still cause for celebration is remarkable. Only a handful of writers are remembered centuries after they cease working. Perhaps that is because the work they produced while living never stops working in us. Shakespeare’s influence on literature is enormous. Characters he invented generate more speculation and analysis than many historical figures. His accomplishments are so remarkable that simply referring to him as “The Bard” is enough to identify who one means. Yet precious little is known about his life.

Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World sets out to change that. But it is an unusual “biography” because it narrates Shakespeare’s life through descriptions of the world he lived in and how the  poetry and characters he created reflected that world. Greenblatt is a noted Shakespearean scholar and professor of Humanities at Harvard, but this biography is anything but dry. It is a readable, lively, witty, and utterly engaging look at events we know happened in Shakespeare’s life and times—but always through the lens of what he wrote. Thus, Greenblatt makes some brilliant observations about Shakespeare’s marriage based almost completely on the marriages we see in his plays. Along the way, as Greenblatt progresses play by play, we enjoy similar observations on humor, last wills, witchcraft, property, ambition, depression, joy, in short a whole world wholly created by a master craftsman.

Although it’s not his primary objective, Greenblatt ends up making a compelling argument for Shakespeare as the sole author of the plays. Great art, he argues, although it can be influenced by learning and discipline, sometimes simply appears out of truly gifted individuals with the talent, desire and opportunity to present it. By showing how Shakespeare keenly observed the world in which he lived and worked, Greenblatt presents a new dimension to Shakespeare’s genius. That world, in turn, influenced Shakespeare’s art, craft, and stagecraft. Those cross connections demonstrate just how Shakespeare evolved into a great playwright. Like all great writers, he wrote about what he knew and because he had lived it, it rang true.

Although Greenblatt bases many observations and conclusions on deduction and supposition, he also draws intelligent and accurate conclusions about Shakespeare.  At times he speculates (mostly hitting the mark but not always convincingly) on how Shakespeare used the world that formed him to, in turn, form his great works. Greenblatt also explains some popular Latin works which Shakespeare often used including some basic plot elements. This is not unlike the Greek playwrights of their era, who relied so heavily on Homer and the myths for their source material. With Shakespeare, the two greatest sources for much of his work, in addition to the Holinshed Chronicles for historical facts, were mythology and the Bible.

Like historians, biographers draw conclusions from evidence informed by the bias of their time. This is true of Greenblatt’s work. Nevertheless, he makes many significant observations and his insights into Will’s world will leave you thinking about the plays and sonnets in a whole new way. Ultimately, that’s the value of a cultural and historical biography like Greenblatt’s. While many of the details of Shakespeare’s life are sketchy, fortunately we have his great plays, even though they have been through many hands and editors over the years. These masterworks continue to resonate with great insights about human nature. Greenblatt’s book will reshape your thinking about the genius behind  Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. Of course, there will be times you’ll find yourself in total disagreement with him. But that’s the draw of a great biography—to create an atmosphere where discussion adds new fuel to the fire of interpretation and insight.

Check the WRL catalog for Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Or try this book on audio CD

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Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

The poet delves, prying open the past.
Long-forgotten lines live again.
Beowulf breathes, beckoning new readers.
That Heaney is one good maker.

All right, writing the entire post in a pastiche of Anglo-Saxon might be a bit more than I can take on, but the exercise was a good one. Anglo-Saxon poetry is more about the stresses and alliteration than about metrical feet and rhyme. So for a reader used to the patterns of more contemporary verse, taking on “Beowulf” can be a bit daunting, even if you can read Anglo-Saxon. For those of us less gifted, Seamus Heaney’s translation provides a superb entry into this masterpiece.

In many ways, “Beowulf” is the root of fantasy fiction, especially of the sword-swinging, dragon-slaying variety. As J.R.R. Tolkien noted in his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” too often scholars studying the poem set aside the more fantastic elements of the story focusing rather on those of a more historical nature. To do so, though, deprives the reader of the power of the story; as Tolkien said, “Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that any historical value it may possess must always be of secondary importance.” For readers of any fantasy fiction of the past 100 or so years the Beowulf story, with its blend of politics, magic, and fighting will have a familiar resonance.

So take some time this Spring to sit down with Seamus Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf.” Read it slowly, and let the roll and plunge of the language sweep over you and carry you across the sea to Hrothgar’s hall, where Grendel terrorizes the kingdom of the Danes, until there comes a mighty warrior to free the country from this nightmare.

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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.”

Pity the Ancient Mariner for he must tell his story over and over to different people or he suffers a “woful agony”. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous ballad poem the ancient Mariner is an old man who grabs a reluctant wedding guest and tells him the compelling narrative of being the only survivor of an ill-fated sailing ship journey when the rest of the crew died of thirst.

For lovers of horror and gothic themes this poem is truly creepy. It even has zombies.
“They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.”

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is like Shakespeare and The Bible in that bits of them keep popping up in everyday language, whether you realise where they come from or not. Do you have slimy things with legs in your kitchen? Then they crawled straight out of the Ancient Mariner. Have you ever had an albatross around your neck? That’s what happened to the poem’s narrator as a punishment for shooting the albatross and bringing a curse down on the entire ship. Was there ever water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink? That was the fate of the Ancient Mariner’s shipmates.

It is a grand adventure that some people feel was the start of the Romantic Movement in literature when it was first published in 1789. It talks about life, death, faith, friendship, and the supernatural. Its story, themes, and images have been used time and time again in other works of literature, art, and movies, in everything from Douglas Adam’s comic novel The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul to the heavy metal band Iron Maiden’s Powerslave.

If you have never read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner all the way through, try it and you may be surprised at how many phrases you recognise. If you had read it as a long-ago school assignment, revisit it and wait for the shivers down your spine.

The library owns several copies. In addition to several anthologies, we have annotated versions with copious background notes. My personal favorite is the stand-alone edition illustrated by Ed Young with haunting monochromatic charcoal and color pastel spreads. It is housed in the children’s section and older children can enjoy its creepiness but adults will also find that the illustrations add depth to the story.

Check the WRL catalog for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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War Music, by Christopher Logue

“Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.”

English poet Christopher Logue died last month, putting an end to the extremely gradual process by which he was retelling the Iliad in free verse. His obituary notes that, since he first started fiddling with Homer in 1959, this was “a literary endeavor noteworthy for lasting four times as long as the Trojan War itself.”

The bad news is that I’ll never get to read Logue’s take on Homer from beginning to end. The good news is that his existing work stands quite well as an Iliad in miniature. War Music hits all the highlights, from the opening confrontation of Achilles and Agamemnon, the original rock and hard place, to Trojan Hector’s off-screen but inevitable death. You get a little bit of single combat, cuckolded Menelaos versus Paris “with the curly-girly hair,” and you get a full-scale Greek-and-Trojan melee, with officers and grunts alike inflicting “high-reliability fast-forward pain.”

Aeneas’ axe
Enhanced the natural crackage of his skull,
And he quit being.

Logue, who famously knew no Greek, keeps to plain language and a rolling more-or-less iambic pentameter with a lot of forward momentum. Freely anachronistic, he incorporates WWII references and screenplay terms into something like a director’s cut of Homer’s epic poem. It hardly matters that his words are modern, when the tone and the themes are age-old: what are we fighting for, is it worth it, and will this nine, no, ten-year war ever end?

Check the WRL catalog for War Music.

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Every Thing On It: Poems and Drawings, by Shel Silverstein

Janet finishes off the week with some fine poetry.

Just published, Every Thing On It, is a magical collection of poems and drawings that my kids, your kids, – and of course each of us who are still a kid at heart- will enjoy. The collection is quintessential Shel Silverstein – poems that are funny, sentimental and often completely off the wall. Silverstein, a poet and artist, well known for Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, and The Giving Tree, died in 1999. He left behind over 1000 completed, yet never published, poems and drawings that have been assembled by his family and released here for the first time.

Shel Silverstein helped me bring a love of poetry to my kids. His straightforward, ridiculous, and endearing style always made for a great read aloud and some of his lines we still remember.

He had a knack for knowing how to get a kid’s attention, and sometimes pass a message along without it seeming like a message at all. As in all of his work his pencil drawings bring each poem to life adding to the reading experience. Who else creates wonderfully imaginative and engaging titles such as “Garlic Breath” or Twenty-eight Uses for Spaghetti” that immediately draw you in and demand attention.

The last poem appearing in this new collection, entitled “When I Am Gone” reminds us that Silverstein he is still very much with us and here for another generation of readers young and old to discover either as a solitary reader, listening in a classroom, or sitting together as a family.

When I Am Gone

When I am gone what will you do?
Who will write and draw for you?
Someone smarter- someone new?
Someone better- maybe YOU!

Looking for a special gift for a child this holiday season? Couple this new Silverstein collection with one of his older, favorite titles. You might even offer to read it together as part of the gift. Neither of you will be disappointed.

Check the WRL catalog for Everything On It

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Catching Life by the Throat: How to Read a Poem and Why: Poems from Eight Great Poets, by Josephine Hart

 Josephine Hart, who died this past June, may be best known for novels like Damage and The Truth About Love, but she was also a strong supporter of poets and poetry, founding the Gallery Poets and, in 2004, establishing the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library where actors would read the works of well-known poets. Readers who are interested in learning more about her involvement with poetry may want to check out her 2008 anthology Catching Life by the Throat: How to Read Poetry and Why: Poems from Eight Great Poets.

In Catching Life by the Throat, Hart includes selected poems from W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and W.B. Yeats. Hart wanted to set the poetry “in the context of the life of the poet,” and she introduces the work of each poet with two essays: a biographical sketch of the poet and a discussion of their poetry’s influences and themes. The book also includes a CD of a live recording of the British Library readings, featuring the actors Ralph Fiennes, Roger Moore and Elizabeth McGovern.

I thought Hart’s anthology was an accessible introduction to an interesting group of poets. Of the eight poets featured, I was least familiar with the work of Philip Larkin and Marianne Moore, and I enjoyed learning about their lives and poetry. While short, the essays provide a good background and context for understanding the poets and their work. The CD is a nice touch; the readings are strong and enhance the overall quality of the project.

Catching Life by the Throat is the type of anthology that could appeal to readers who are just learning about poetry as well as readers looking to rediscover favorite poets.

Search the WRL Catalog for Catching Life by the Throat

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Endpoint and Other Poems, by John Updike

Poetry allows the reader to examine familiar things in extraordinary ways as well as to experience completely new things. John Updike’s Endpoint allows us both opportunities. While he is known by most readers as a novelist of unmatched skill, Updike is also a poet whose work does not rely on his fame in the fiction field, but rather stands on its own merits.

The poems in this collection were all written in the last 7 years of Updike’s life, and the final shaping of the book took place in his last months. As a result, there is a somewhat elegiac feel to many of the poems, particularly in the opening sequence of the book “Endpoint.” Here Updike recalls his parents, friends, colleagues and others whose lives intersected with his. The final poems in this section explore his last illness, and “Endpoint” closes with a series of poems written in his last weeks of life.

Despite the somewhat somber start, the collection as a whole has a joyful feel. Updike’s poetry is often playful and always full of life. He has an eye for color and shape (Updike wrote some excellent nonfiction on art, see Still Looking: Essays on American Art), and his poems evince a delight in language.

If you have only read Updike’s novels–witty, urbane, and full of life–you should certainly take the time to look through his poetry as well. If you are unfamiliar with Updike, you could do worse than to start with the poetry to get a sense of this thoughtful writer whose death in 2008 left a hole in American letters.

Check the WRL catalog for Endpoint

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Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems

Yesterday’s post explored the roots of English poetry, looking at the poems of Anglo-Saxon England. Today, we look at medieval poetry of the four great Middle Eastern cultures–Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew. Editor and translator Bernard Lewis brings together both classic, for example Rumi and Hafiz, and less well-known writers in this captivating collection.

Lewis’s introduction does an excellent job setting the cultural framework in which the poems are set. He also discusses the challenges of translating poems from another culture in a way that makes the process understandable to the non-poet.

But it is the poems themselves that make this book particularly intriguing.  They cover all imaginable topics, from passionate love to spirituality to drinking. Most of the poems are on the shorter side, many only a few lines long, but in those few lines each word shines. If one of the best ways to better understand another culture is to read its writing, these poems give the reader an entry into the heart of the Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew cultures. It is an understanding that is in sore need these days.

Here’s one poem from the 11th century poet  Samuel ha-Nagid:

Man’s wisdom is in his writing
his mind at the tip of his pen
With his pen he can reach as high
as a king with a scepter.

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The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation

If you enjoy poetry of any sort, you should find something to enjoy in editors Greg Delanty and Michael Matto’s collection of Anglo-Saxon poems in translation. Delanty has assembled a superb selection of contemporary poets, including Eavan Boland, Robert Hass, Mary Jo Salter, Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, and others, to offer their versions of poems from the Anglo-Saxon world. While some of the translators are conversant in Old English, others are not. Some have chosen to retain the metrical forms of the original poems, while others take more license in their translation. But all of the translations capture the energy and the spirit of the original pieces (at least as far as my basic Old English can tell). They have provided a clear and concise introduction to the poems and to Anglo-Saxon culture. There is also an interesting afterword from some of the translators talking about the challenges of translating these pieces.

While most of us have read “Beowulf” (or at least should have read it for class), it is only a part of a large and varied body of poetry written from the 5th to the 11th centuries. This anthology displays both the breadth and the depth of the poets of that time. There are prayers, biblical stories, poems of war and battle (only to be expected), love poems, riddles, and charms and remedies. All of the concerns of daily life were meat for these poets. As an added bonus, the anthology offers both the Old English version along with the translation, as well as a pronunciation guide.

So, dig in, delve deep, and discover.

Check the WRL catalog for The Word Exchange

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