Multiples

Vintage, the publisher, should feel deep, dark, spooky shame for letting this remarkable book go out of print. The reviewer below is misguided in his or her belief that there are more than a few clunkers among the translations: hogwash. Wilbur's rendition of "Le Pont Mirabeau" is an exceptionally musical version of an exceptionally musical poem, and approximates beautifully the Whistleresque mood. To critique Pound's translation is like saying "Damn the Moon, it's full of holes." Sure, but its the Moon. On the whole, this book gets it right, offering an interesting selection of poets and translators (just as there is more than one kind of poet, so too are there different, and equally valid, forms of translation). Seek it out till Bertlesman come to their multinational senses.

Paul Auster chose his poems well, and the bilingual presentation, format, and ordering of the poets are all clear and easy to follow. It's wonderful to have this access to modern French poetry in English. There are two problems, however: First, there are hardly any women poets (I think 1 out of 50 - the unrelenting masculine viewpoint gets tedious, like being trapped in a cigar-smoke-filled men's room). And second, some of the translations are graceless and inaccurate. Mr. Auster's secondary goal was to choose among already-existing translations by American and British poets. Many of these ruin the mood, parallelisms and imagery of the poems. For instance, Apollinaire's "Mirabeau Bridge" is tortured into English rhyme, destroying all subtlety. Milosz's "November Symphony" has had a meaningless name change to "Strophes" by Ezra Pound, who, if he was going to re-name it, should have called it "Truncations", since he seems to have gotten tired and omitted the last third of the poem. All in all, though, I'm very pleased to have it.

When this book was released in 1997, I was just beginning to explore how crafting experimental poetry within formal structures could help me to find nuances not been available to me before within my poetic voice. Mary Leader became for me a far-off mentor.

Though I've never met her, I've returned to her work time and time again, and I continue to find it compelling and lyrical, her images almost tangible. Like a lovely, durable, hand-stitched quilt, there is a utility to these poems for me -- utility that is translated though craft, and craft that is a vehicle for art.

Lovely and musical, honest and nonpretentious, accomplished and enduring -- Mary Leader's poems show her ability to listen to the world with a finely tuned ear and re-create that experience with grace and skill.

The poems are formally experimental, which I often find intellectually engaging but less compelling emotionally. Red Signature conveys an uncommon warmth. I like thinking about these poems, but also just reading them, feeling with them.

I bought this book out of my interest in Indian literature, but found that it resonated as deeply with my non-Indian womaness. Simple and clear, the writings take you all over the place and bring you back to yourself. Thanks to my Indian sisters.

I teach Native American literature. Since the publication of this book I have been unable to exclude it from my syllabus. Students almost unanimously have endorsed this choice, even when they had to shell out the money for the hardcover. Now that it is in paperback, no one should exclude it.

I only regret that an anthology of similar quality of organization, focus, and selection does not exist for male and female Native writers.

Juliana Spahr's first full-length collection, Response, is in many regards a literary contradiction. For although Spahr evinces an impeccable knowledge of contemporary theory with its penchant for devaluing emotive meaning, her work is in no way a simple exercise in the problematics of language. Perhaps responding to what Harold Bloom calls "a tradition too wealthy to need anything more," Spahr abandons a contemporary poetics obsessed with the accrual of style, insisting instead on a plain, anti-lyrical poetics of witness....Because she strives to encompass the broadest dimensions of the human condition‹-mortality, disease, the confusion of identity‹-Spahr has no need to display a refined poetic palette (though the intelligence of her writing suggests that this palette is available to her). In fact it would appear that she deliberately forgoes refinement in an effort to make herself clear.

"Response" is an awesome little book, full of true alien possession and non-ego voices from beyond the self, voicing outside in the mass media, wandering from beyond the grave. A spooky and exacting text, would not make good bedtime reading but you should visit there if you want to try on another kind of poetics from the post-language school of trans-ego poetics. Juliana Spahr is a gifted and giving poet, whose works will create their own new world ordering of the real. Cosmic and local at the same time, spooky and lyrical, exacting at all points. A powerful first book of many to come.

This book is an easy read, & the poems easy to understand; because of the interesting bios on each author. Once you start to read it, you won't be able to put it down. It is wonderful.

Many of the short stories leave you with wanting to read more!
The poetry is easy to read for a novice and to ponder.

This is an absolutely wonderful collection of stories by some of the country's best current writers. Maya Anglou's troubling story about the difficulty of containing the past and Tim McLaurin's powerful tale of sin and redemption alone are worth the price of admission.

"THE ROUGH ROAD HOME is a stunning collection and a landmark book." --Josephine Humphreys "[A] fine and affectionate anthology." --Will Blythe, literary editor for ESQUIRE "This superlative collection, elegantly and thoughtfully edited by RObert Gingher, shows a wonderful creativity and a wide diversity of voices. THere is real pleasure and excitement here for every reader who cares about contemporary fiction." --George Garrett

I first came across Mr. Fry's work while taking a course in translation. One of the texts in the book, which you were supposed to translate into Spanish, was an extract of "The Lady's not for Burning". A hard task indeed! I remember being intrigued by its originality and force, and keeping it in the back of my mind, until I finally bought this book. Well, what can I say? Mr. Fry has a gift - his plays are magnificent. I have seldom read anyone with such a command of language and a feel for the sheer beauty of it. Sometimes it seems like he's trying to revive that rich, rewarding complexity of the Elizabethan playwrights. And he succeeds. This is certainly one writer you shouldn't miss. There's something Shakespearean-like in these plays.

This collection of five of Fry's plays includes his first play, The Boy with a Cart. It also includes some of his more popular works--the spectacular The Lady's Not for Burning, A Phoenix Too Frequent, and A Sleep of Prisoners. The final play in the collection is one I'd never found before, Curtmantle: a wonderful telling of the reign of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, of their ambitious feuding sons, of their love that turned to bitterness, and of the famous fighting between the king and his counsellor that ended in the murder of Thomas Beckett.

If I were teaching Sandburg, i would use this collection as my text.

The introduction is concise, yet informative, giving some quick context to the life and ideas behind the poems.

Keeping in mind this is a selected works, and not a complete works, think of this as a "best of" edition.

Organized by ideas: * Chicago * Images * Poems of Protest * Love Poems * Lincoln * Anti-War and War Poems * Portraits * African-Americans * Poet of the People * Musings * Poetry Definitions.

By organizing them idealogically, it helps the reader becoming familiar with Sandburg as a primer. You can see his clear cynicism of religion and of religious people, and of his socialistic leanings (he is direct about these thoughts). His "Billy Sunday" is an intriguing look at a man who was just a man, yet spoke about Christ. Though Sandburg was known to be atheistic, it could be argued he had more spiritual thoughts.

You can read his sense of empathy and unity with the common man. Any urban dweller will hum in agreement to so much of his Chicago poems.

Sandburg's sense of rural beauty comes out, as does his pure admiration of Lincoln. Well-said is his recollection of the sinking of the Eastland (a boat which sunk in the Chicago River)... or, rather, his thoughts of how so many people died, and how many might've died.

I could go poem by poem, but the fact remains that Sandburg's style impacts poets today, from the Beats to Maya Angelou, to Gwendolyn Brooks.

I fully recommend this book.

Anthony Trendl

Sandburg was a superb poet. he speaks in such a raw voice, that the poems cannot help but to reach out and touch you, whether he writes about love, injustice, protest, war, chicago or any other subject.

Galway Kinnell is a poet for all seasons. His voice is full bodied, in touch with the real world, and his vision is compelling. He deals with love and death and the glories of the natural world with crafty and beautiful language. No other American poet of his time has dealt so fully with the world of living creatures in a way that celebrates them without sentiment. His A NEW SELECTED POEMS allows us to sample the best of a lifetime of poetic output and is must reading for those who want to sample the best of contemporary American Poetry. Kinnell is one of our poetic giants and he deals with all that life, love and death, and the glorious and astounding natural world have to offer. You will feel better and less alone after sharing his thoughts and experiences. Daniela Gioseffi, American Book Award winning poet/editor/novelist.

One of Kinnell's greatest poems, from his 1985 volume The Past, is "The Road Between There and Here". In that, the poet travels a familiar road, remembering all that has happened "here", for instance: "Here the local fortune teller took my hand and said 'what is still/ possible is inspired work, faithfulness to a few, and a last love,/ which, being last, will be like looking up and seeing the/ parachute opening up in a shower of gold." That's near the end of the road, of course, after literature, first love, children,contemplation,frogs, speckled eggs, piglets,and Handel are recalled. Reading Kinnell's A New Selected Poems (his last selections were published in 1982)is like traveling the life road with him between there and here, stopping to watch him as he ages from a young poet with attention to form and intellectual pursuits, to a feeling poet -- a nature eulogist and family man --, to a seeker of self in his late middle age, and finally in his latest poems from Imperfect Thirst, into a quiet and nearly sentimental muser. There are no new poems here, but the poet's full,long and deeply lived life, presented and arranged here with an old man's sense of patterns and wisdom, is well worth a return to familiar poems in this new context. I think this volume should be read from start to finish without pause, unlike most poetry books -- the real beauty here is feeling Kinnell's life and insights blossom, flourish and settle. As for the individual poems: there is vigor and attention to language and ideas in his early work, but I find the poems from his middle volumes most moving. The Book of Nightmares may be Kinnell's master work, but I love even more the succinct, prayerful poems of Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. These poems combine his bond with the natural world with his own losses and desires surely,with precision and courage, not the sentiment of later poems. This sureness fuels the poems of When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone, as he sheds life previously lived and starts anew. Reading the whole selection may actually improve the effect of the poems from Imperfect Thirst, which in that volume seemed to me rambling ,disappointingly prosey, a little too sweet. Now, I see the grace of age, letting go of rigors and concepts and form and loving simplicity, and answering the call to rush onto the page before the poet arrives at the end of road,"all used up, that's it." A moving volume that left me somehow loving my own life more,--could the hardest parts have been the best after all? Kinnell convinced me, the road is worth every mile.

I bought it for one poem: "Love Song". It is the best poem about love and lust that I have ever read.

Published in 1987, this book contains page-length poems selected by the author. You don't read these poems to get a story line, but rather a feeling of place. With Ammons its the precise observation of nature "Bees stopped on the rock", or a "Snow log". There are also mirrors of the self, "of a life that did become" in the poem Easter morning. In some ways, he is a modern Transcendentalist, looking at nature, observing carefully, and looking even deeper. I recommend this book to anyone, and its a good introduction to Ammons.