Poetry Month is coming to an end. Events such as poem in your pocket day, which encourages the carrying around of a poem in your pocket; thirty poets, thirty days, a celebration of poets through tweets; and the spring books list, reproduced below, a specially-compiled list of great new collections of poetry, celebrate the power [...]
Continue Reading →This year’s Costa Book of the Year Award went to a book of poetry, On Mutability by Jo Shapcott. Bravo! Makes a nice change to have poetry win a major book award and the Shapcott is a sharpshooter of a poet, quick, accurate, and piercing. Inspired by her battle with breast cancer, the poems in [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the only novel written by poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Brigge is a young man living in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century; he is Danish, poor, aristocratic and poetic but the most salient feature of Brigge is that he is encompassed by depression. He is [...]
Continue Reading →Harold Pinter’s Death etc. is a slim but sobering collection of his essays, plays, and poems about war, and specifically war as promulgated (fostered, supported, funded) by the United States. The works abound in references both veiled and stark to the United States’ promotion of right wing regimes of terror, and The U.S.’ record of human [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I read Ten Poems to Set You Free by Roger Housden. Housden has written a series of books about poems, all with the theme of reading and using poems to help a person change themselves for the better. Housden writes with energy and sincerity and he picks great poems by good poets. Mary Oliver, Stanley [...]
Continue Reading →Yesterday I read The Yellow Leaves, a collection of memoir pieces, essays and poems, by Frederick Buechner. I have never read any of his work before but I loved the title The Yellow Leaves and so I dove in. The title comes from a sonnet of Shakespeare: That time of year thou mayst in me behold [...]
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