Books

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Sally's Hair: Poems
John Koethe
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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North Point North: New and Selected Poems
Falling Water: Poems
Scar Tissue: Poems
Man and Camel: Poems
The Constructor: Poems

ASIN: 0061176273
Release Date: 2007-03-27

Book Description

John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death."

Dwelling Song: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series)

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an Orphean lament

Dwelling Song: Poems (Contemporary Poetry Series)
Sally Keith
Manufacturer: University of Georgia Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Design (The Colorado Prize)
Chokecherries: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1999
Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form: Poems

ASIN: 0820325996

Book Description

As a hummingbird beats its wings so that it might be still to feed on a flower the poet concludes, "The equation keeps balancing out, and / I'm drawn to how it does not settle." Aware of the difficulty of loving the world while feeding upon it, the poems of Dwelling Song hope vision is levity as they press language to make sight and song. This writing is a form of mimicry yet an act of dangerous flight. Whether from the voice of a hunter, shepherd, farmer, or bugle-blowing boy on a city street, the song recognizes that moving forward necessitates turning one's back.

Customer Reviews:

an Orphean lament.......2006-07-25

I came to Dwelling Song expecting the poems I had seen in Keith's first book, Design. Or at least that part of those poems I could most keenly remember. Keith has a way of working with detail, of sharpening an image until it occupies a time, space, and potential outside of reality, and yet reflective of reality. That may sound too circular. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Keith has a capacity to simultaneously see and feel an image within the space of her poem, opening the reader to the possibility of its intellectual and emotional significance. This is what I brought to Dwelling Song from Design.

And that precise descriptive power is in this second book, though it takes different shapes. Certain deeply voiced poems, like "The Gallery" or "Song for the Rain", describe the sharpness the world assumes when loss becomes the only lens for viewing the world, when it might seem better for the speaker to hold herself away from this world, because it offers only an intent encroachment upon her peace. These poems are ruddy and inspiring. When I finish one, it makes me want another as potent & emotionally dense. And so when Keith offers only six or seven I react by first wondering if this move away from the deep voice is a flaw.

And it may be. However, the intelligence in this book, and in Design, makes me trust this poet. I am willing to look and allow Keith to teach me how I should read her book. These poems outside the deep voice are still dealing with the book's premise in an equally sincere way. It's just that their method of shifting from one image to the next bring their emotional affect too close to the reader's face. And I guess what I start to see is a flattening of that precision Keith offers throughout the book. For example, in the book's center poem, "Rooms Where We Are", Keith uses a clipped fragment to torque her syntax, and because most of these fragments refer back to images she's described in the previous section of the book, the reader, hopefully, experiences through language the sadness and waywardness that can safely be called a theme throughout the book. Unfortunately, my personal experience reading these poems is a hollowness. The repeated images are too heavy with agenda, and too typically gesturing back. There is little subtlety and too much strategy displayed in these poems, and so I find it difficult to let them sink deeper.

Even with this criticism, I recommend Dwelling Song. Partly because of the real talent I see in this second book of poems, and the ambition. I feel that Keith's modulation of voice (the third full section seems to combine the deep voice, and the language voice) gives me more to think about, and though some of these poems may not involve me emotionally, they all interest me intellectually. What I see is a poet who won't settle for the safe, Keith poem, but one who will continually redefine what a Keith poem might be for today.

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Sometimes I wonder
Poem by Jean S. Lee and Sally O. Lee
Manufacturer: BookSurge Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1419601059
Release Date: 2005-02-14

Book Description

Do you ever wonder why cats don't have wings, or why bees like to sting? This is a story about the things we wonder. Why isn't grass red, why is the sky blue? Do you have things that you wonder about? Do you know why stop isn't go, and high isn't low?

A Reasonable Affliction: 1001 Love Poems to Read to Each Other

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A Reasonable Affliction: 1001 Love Poems to Read to Each Other
Sally Ann and James Gordon Wakeman Berk
Manufacturer: Black Dog and Leventhal
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000K7HMT0

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The -ine Poems
Bart Alberti
Manufacturer: Solo Zone Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1886163073

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Who Are You: Poems
Sally Gibbs
Manufacturer: Mellen Poetry Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Where light was born: A personal anthology of selected poems by Fanny Carrión de Fierro ; translated by Sally Cheney Bell

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Where light was born: A personal anthology of selected poems by Fanny Carrión de Fierro ; translated by Sally Cheney Bell
Fanny Carrión de Fierro
Manufacturer: Heritage House, Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Spanish | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1882063473

Pebbles from the Stream: A Collection of Poems by the Mad River Poets

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Pebbles from the Stream: A Collection of Poems by the Mad River Poets
Mad River Poets , Carol Johnson Collins , Ann B. Day , Earline Marsh , Carol Milkuhn , Ruth Pestle , Inga M. Potter , Sally Anne Reisner , Dorothy M. Warren , and Jane Stewart Wollmar
Manufacturer: Mad River Poets
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0972326200

Product Description

Collection of poems by Mad River Poets, Vermont.

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Rocking Chair Rhymes
Lucy Hassell Davis
Manufacturer: Hopice of Catawba Valley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000BJSDZE

Product Description

Rocking chairs poems for readin in front of a warm fireplace. Money was donated to the Hospice of Catawaba Valley.

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Intelligent, perceptive, talented R.H.W. Dillard

Sallies: Poems
R. H. W. Dillard
Manufacturer: Louisiana State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Darting into the unknown as only best poetry safely can, R.H.W. Dillard's new collection bursts with bold violations of customs, flights of fancy, and insouciant leaps of tone and form. Unwaveringly skillful, these brave sallies explore the complex texture of life and death, light and dark, in "earth's eastering whirl," unafraid to confront paradox and finding in their sudden swift grace moments of "poise and equipoise"--the preciousness of now in the face of the infinite: "Somewhere eternity extends itself like Saturday / with so many things to do and voices in the air / Somewhere a light will fill forever / like straw spun into gold."

Dillard counterbalances his meditative forays with comic excursions into forbidden territory, including a major poem on flatulence--an ode to bran; three appreciations in verse of fellow writer's work; a barbed academic memo to a dim colleague; and, audaciously, a textbook anthologist's brief history of American poetry based on the mistaken premise that all the poets were Chinese-American acrobats ("The Flying Changs").

SALLIES' daring manifests in complex rhyme patterns, unrhymed verse, concrete and found poems, and a closing set of poems complimenting a young woman (Sallie) in the tradition of Dante's poems to Beatrice and drawing together the themes and stylistic variety of the entire book in a celebration of, in Emerson's words, the "open hours/ When the God's will sallies free": "By chance (or some higher plan) someone arrives / Just when we need them, shows us the way / From the window's ledge or to the open door, / Helps us to find ourselves....and more."

Customer Reviews:

Intelligent, perceptive, talented R.H.W. Dillard.......2001-12-29

Review of R.H.W. Dillard's Sallies, a collection of his poems

Sally n.; pl. -lies.

A rushing or bursting forth; a brief outbreak into activity, an excursion, esp. one away from the usual track, a flight of fancy, liveliness or wit, a flashing forth of a quick and active mind, a brilliantly spoken or written passage, a bold violation of custom.

Richard Dillard, Roanoke-born scholar, takes us on a poetic excursion. We sally into his poetic expression on the edge of propriety; there are no really bad words.
His body of work in Sallies is varied: long and short, rhymed and unrhymed, serious and comical. It's fun to read.
With a doctorate in English and professor of English at Hollins University in Roanoke, Dillard surprises with perceptive poetic imagery and then shocks with a big poem on flatulence.
Imagery: "The silhouette of a songbird / Sways on the tip of a cedar, / Transfers to a nearby hemlock, / Flutters and pivots on the highest slender / Limb, a fragment of evening song, / Then gone."
Flatulence: "O my bran-eating healthy ones, / My windy-bummed buglers, oat-eaters, / Husk-crunchers, settling back after the evening's meal, / Awaiting... / Explosions that float the buttocks."
He pokes fun at a dim-witted colleague: "Even the devil had one good idea. / Hitler had the autobahn, / Stalin, the central Asian dams, / So, I suppose even a fool / like you must know something true, / One thing almost valid, / But, quite seriously, I doubt it."
Explores aging, life and death, loneliness:
"The mysteries of summer, / Great mystery of time, shadows / Soon to lengthen even at noon, / While earlier today a crow / Punching at the meaty side / Of the rabbit in the road / Cast none at all, the sun dead overhead, / nights will spread, days fade, / But summer still begins, the heat, / Height of the year. / We seek solace from time... / The rabbit's ghost shimmers on the new-mown lawn, / Then breaks away, a jagged line, / Four crows huddle in a dark clump / As a distant train groans / And shifts its load of coal, / Drones on to tomorrow's early dawn."
In Black Dog Dillard likens deep depression bordering on death, much as Churchill did, as a black dog, "The mood that swells like a gray cloud / Even on a bright morning, / Or on a gray morning covers the day / Like a musty blanket, one stored too long / In a cellar cabinet or damp case in the attic."
The shortest entry is one sentence, 10 syllables, 13 if you count the title.
"Without You Each day grows old, no minute ever new."
The longest poems, hardly worth tromping through, were created when Dillard was asked to write several critical essays on the works of several other authors. "I avoided the agony of writing critical prose by writing in verse and allowing the muse to do the heavy lifting," he writes in the endnotes.
For the most part, the three essays are too heavy for the light reader, appealing most likely only to other writers.
He should have followed Ciardi's dictum even as he quoted it in Fred Chappell's Poetry: Paradox and Tension.

"It seems that more often year by year / I ignore (poet John) Ciardi's dictum / 'Not to send a poem on a prose errand."'

The third essay in verse, Anthropophagi is a bit more fun as he tells critics to get their tucked heads out of their vests, their buried heads out of their chests and
read the books, not just the books about the books, "read Poe, / Actually read him, read Twain, read Robinson, / Read the women and the men... / Read everything from Shakespeare to Stapledon, / And read them well, not just to fit a template / Or make a point dozens have already made."
Some of his poems have recognizable forms - as does How You Saved My Life: A Letter, written in 20 stanzas of three lines each, the last word of each third line rhyming with the last word in the first line of the stanza to follow, thus:

"Since you asked, it wasn't swift heroics,
A leap in front of a moving train
Or a fireman's carry from a burning tower.

It didn't happen in a minute, even an hour,"

And this:

"By chance (or some higher plan) someone arrives
Just when we need them, shows us the way
From the window's ledge or to the open door,

Helps us to find ourselves...and more.
So that's the story, Sallie, all there is.
I send it with my love and thanks. OXOX"

Dillard has written five other poetry collections, most recently Just Here, Just Now, 1994; two novels, a story collection, two critical studies and verse translations of plays by Plautus and Aristophanes.

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Books:

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