A regrettably poor poet, seek out the prose works instead
345448
The poet Kenneth Patchen is a fascinating figure. He was a conscientious objector in World War II, the "good war" even many pacifists would refuse to have stayed out of. He was unconnected to academia, writing highly personal poetry without quotation of other works or allusions to the canon. And he was an eclectic figure, the poet-as-loner one moment and a collaborator with jazzmen in poetry recitals the next. Yet, for all the fascinating details of his biography, his poetry is overwhelmingly disappointing. This volume of "collected poems", really a selection of material from 1936 to 1967 that leaves quite a bit out, shows the wild inconsistency of his entire career.

In the poetry of World War II, pacifist prophecy is in the spotlight, and it is often as troublesome to the reader as Ezra Pound's work of the same era. In the "The Stars Go to Sleep So Peacefully", the first poem selected from "An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air" (1945), written long after the U.S. was dragged into the war and the Final Solution was underway, Patchen calls the Allies "little fools ... in haste of money". That he afterward adds the eloquent lines "Love is impaled on a million bayonets" doesn't mean the reader forgets about his peculiar view on this war. In "The Way Men Live is a Lie", from the same volume, a diatribe against supposedly greedy generals looking for profit--which due to its considerable use of profanity I cannot quote here--is again followed by general pacifist sentiments that would be unobjectionable if not for what came before.

The war poems could be left aside if the rest of the material were good--as, for example, is often done with Pound. But he other themes make for embarassing verse. Patchen deeply loved his life Miriam, writing numerous love poems to her. These, however, are usually doggerel worthy of shy high-school note passing. Take, for example, the poem "For Myriam" (1942): "O the world is a place of veils and roses / when she is there / I come to her in wonder / ... And there is nothing cruel or mad or evil / Anywhere."

This last poem features furthermore one of Patchen's most tired trope, the filler "O". Almost every poem of his contains this, e.g. "O the eagle empties his terrible eye upon them", "O the beautiful again...", "O the wonderful wonderful wonderful", "O green birds / that sings the earth to wakefulness", "O she is as lovely-often as every day". Patchen the poet had no skill in naturally flowing poetry, everything is full of ridiculous rhetorical exaggeration.

Patchen's prose works, THE JOURNAL OF ALBION MOONLIGHT (published by New Directions) and SLEEPERS AWAKE (long out of print, but available at many libraries) are much less problematic than his poetry.
3194695
This collection, and Plath in general I think, get both unfairly burdened and paradoxically minimized.

So many readers want Plath to mean and to be so many things. Ultimately, this hagiography leads to diminishing the depth of her art to a patina of idiot wind like "feminist," "confessional," and "obsessed with her Daddy/Elektra stuff."

All of which has unfortunately kept me away from deeply reading Plath for so long. Interestingly, I came to re-read this collection (or really, in my mind, to read it now for the first time) only because I was reading and LOVING the collected poems of Ted Hughes. He was simply blowing my mind---so I read a bit about him, and though I knew he was married to Plath and a bit about the soap operatic story of his second wife, I never appreciated how much HE, this awe inspiring genius poet stood in total awe of Plath's work. If he was that impressed, I had to see what the fuss was about.

And underneath all the expectations and labels, what it's about is DAMN good poetry. The collection starts off with "Morning Song," which is the most accurate, beautiful, sad, and perfect poem I've ever read about caring for children and caring for yourself when you're caring for children. The phrase I used when describing some of the lines to my wife was "inevitable." That's the highest compliment one poet can give another---it means that she didn't get CLOSE to the "truth" of what she was trying to say...she didn't "turn a clever phrase" or tell the truth "slant." She wrote PERFECT words and lines. They HAVE TO be that way. She said it the best it can be said. Done.

Luckily for artists after her, she didn't do this ALL the time (who could?) While MANY of the poems in Ariel are inevitable, some miss. Some still hold on to Plath's earlier style in Colossus wherein she attacks the Thesaurus and pursues a sense of ambiguity to the point of producing coldness and vague, limpid lines.

But do not be put off by these cautions or by any possible cliche or negative expectations---Plath was an intensely gifted and cosmically touched poet---Ariel roars.
2303717
Dummies seems an adequate introduction. A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver is far better, in content and writing.
4271239
This assemblage of six line stanzas, in precarious sonnet form, that is, Henry's de facto form, finds the text crammed and twisted, the poetic content bewilderingly mashed into many of these lines of text. What starkly emerges is the power of an intense amount of self-generated pain.

The despair and self-loathing contrasts sharply with the wicked wit and occasional flash of meanness; the confessionally inclined Henry emerges as a not-too-honest, lustful and quite sad storyteller. The DREAM SONGS are anything but flawless; and yet, the flaws are so unique that they augment the collage of experience that Berryman at times compellingly depicts. Some of the SONGS are flat out brilliant, while others are just oozing with sticky pathos and self-indulgent whining. These are the loosely linked themes that bear the load of Henry's loves, losses, work-in-progress, current events, and even some domestic details.

Berryman's denial notwithstanding, his Henry and Bones personas, standing unsteadily through the too-many alcoholic dawns ... well, he somehow manages to pull himself together enough to shakily get to class and lecture in order to earn some more whiskey money. And to his credit, his erudition lurks on through these self-styled sonnet songs - experimental collages, maudlin at times, fueled by the hard liquored nights.

Jung would say Berryman is "too high up in his mind", a personality riddled with self-importance. Under the currents of self-loathing and pity lurks an obvious hankering for fame - and the DREAM SONGS provide the catharsis and exit for his regrets, which seem many.

No, Henry is not one prone to humility - and his creator can be a real horse's ass, with many racist undercurrents weaving through the sniveling and morbid death obsessions. Yet, throughout all the textual dross, lies the glint of poetic nuggets waiting to be claimed by the metaphorically intrepid.
4727591
I had been looking forward to reading something by this author for some time.  Maybe I would have been better off with another one of his books, or actually reading rather than listening.  (This was a BBC audiobook, read by James Wilby).  To begin with, I thought I had purchased a biography of Thomas Chatterton.  I hadn't.  This is a novel.  A crew of annoying characters populates this speculative tale concerning poet Thomas Chatterton, who was of course the classic romantic what-if tale of English literature - a gifted young poet whose work went unrecognized in his time, a fact that helped push him to commit suicide at age 19 or so.  In this book, an unsuccessful English writer discovers an old painting, which appears to be of Chatterton, but as a grown man.  The story develops that perhaps Chatterton faked his own death, and from that point used a variety of noms de plume.  The themes of doubling, faking, and questionable authorship persist throughout the story, and to be honest, I had trouble keeping up with all of it.  An old female writer, the young writer's boss, also gets involved.  There are attempts at adding levity by the portrayal of this loony crone (and other eccentrics) but these mostly fall flat.  What I found most enjoyable was the historical fiction parts of it, the scenes of young Chatterton and his mates having discussions and plotting his phony demise - but the majority of the book takes place in the modern world, and the numerous inconsequential discussions and the like made me yearn for a blue pencil.  Ackroyd is known mostly as a biographer (of Dickens and others).  I still would like to give one of those biographies a try.
2634015
Only for Hitchins fans -- But if you are interested in the most elegant language and style, if you love name-dropping, politics, literature, confrontation, honesty without thought to consequences, and being privvy to the world of egalitarian activism, you will love this CD. Unfortunately, Hitch is much better as a writer than as a reader. Others with delightful British accents have READ works capitvating audiences with their elegant British lilt. But Hitch reads as tho this was a dismal task that had to be completed. His voice is soporific. Nonetheless -- stick with it if you love the curmudgeon whose work has not been adequately hailed. RIP- I miss him.
4718384
Bloom is overrated and most certainly is a poor representative of a modern critic of poetry. One problem with any Bloom text is his smuggling , illicitly no doubt, biased readings of poems, readings unsupported by persuasive reasoning.  A better way to approach literature is to read and use C.S Lewis's Experiment in Criticism. I am sorely depressed when I realize that many professors, critics, and readers are looking for readings of the texts that match the relativism of today's post-modern, deconstructive interpretation , exemplified by Derrida, Eagleton etc. No way that 2015 exemplifies anything that makes sense. Does today's undermining predominant critical apparatus preclude sound, carefully reasoned carefully argument. Kenner's books and Davenport's fiction and non-fiction although unmatched critical works are mere detritus in our shallow time.
443392
Overly sentimental and thoroughly lacking in wisdom. Jamison is an excellent writer who should explore something besides wounds and victimhood. (The best essays were the ones where she barely inserts her own pain and self-reflection)
2411787
Fugitive Pieces, indeed.  Not even creditable poetry.  Certainly not estimable fiction.  Pieces? yes.  Fugitive? Without a doubt.
The title may be the only honesty of this annoyance that pretends to be a book -- a  novel or a long poem.  I was asked by a friend to read it.  Otherwise, I  would never have finished it. Early on, I could sense its origins in poetic  inspiration -- but of questionable quality.
As I read I began to  recognize yet another example of contemporary cultural product, the  "packaged book" -- a stitched-together pastiche of poetic patches  and prose hodgepodgeries pretending to Holocaust importance -- exploiting  and thereby trivializing that tragedy.
But the title should have  warned us.  These are "fugitive pieces." Why then blind ourselves  with the perception that this book is more than that, as though it contains  some deeper unity of  meaning, some intriguing mystery? I cannot shake the  feeling that this is yet another collection of discrete poetic pieces made  to appear like a singular prose work. It may look like one but it doesn't  read like one.  It simply doesn't work.
The seams still show.  As for the  poetry, there are flashes of lyrical beauty.  But for the most part the  poetic images are labored.  Metaphors alone do not true poetry make.
And  "Fugitive Pieces," especially up front, drips  in tiresome (and  tired) metaphors.  In fact, "Fugitive Pieces" is, itself, a  metaphor for a book, not the real thing.
4901641
There is a laziness to these poems, a fake rigor -- short sparse lines that imply lyric tension, but feel like no more than cocktail coaster jottings.  Lots of vague pseudo-connections, hocus-pocus, imagistic smoke and mirrors -- and to what end?  There is little here that speaks to an intelligent, receptive poetry audience.  It is all word games, which we are told to believe contain some higher purpose and deeper meaning, indiscernible but ever-present.  How the hocum that the academy has labeled "language poetry" has taken root would be hilarious if it were not such a destructive force in American literature.  It undermines the appreciation of clear, powerful multi-textured poetry that is more depth than surface.  Experimental, surreal, futurist poetry can be quite wonderful.  The best of its practitioners, from Stevens to Eluard to Vallejo, spoke directly to their audience, however deflective or circular their language might initially appear.  Its carefully wrought circularity leads the reader, or listener, into a labyrinth resonant with music of all sorts.  Ms. Armantrout's verse, and its ilk, speaks to itself, unintelligibly and pretentiously.  Read it aloud to another person and ask him or her where it has taken them, aesthetically, emotionally, and spiritually.  Pairing odd combinations of images -- many of them not even fresh or original -- is not poetry, but gamesmanship, verbal solitaire.  Poetry is not about scratching your head, but feeding it.  Try reading some real lyric and narrative poetry: Merwin, Strand, Hecht, Simic, Rich, Justice, Ai, Christopher, Hirsch, Spires, Levine -- there's a world of fabulous American poetry out there, rich with texture, music, and yes, meaning.
4888026
Few poets are as apt at narrative expression or at sweet smooching of the reader's sentiments as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose remarkable life story is a poem, if not more than a poem, in itself. Crystal clear as EBB normally is, however, I at least haven't found it easy to judge exactly what she had in mind in undertaking a work like AURORA LEIGH, a Victorian English romance novel written entirely in iambic pentameter, ultimately beating out BEOWULF as the longest poem in the English language. The result is an epic as unnervingly strange, not to say occasionally impenetrable, as Melville's MOBY DICK.

Not that I am any proper judge here, myself, of course, having only been led roundabout to the perusal of this work in the course of researching Emily Dickinson, herself a bigtime EBB fan who owned and doted on a copy of AURORA LEIGH, liberally "notched" with her own pencil marks upon its pages. Herself unknown in her own lifetime, Emily's fame has since, of course, far overtopped once-famous EBB's, which has faded considerably since then.

The novel's eponymous protagonist Aurora Leigh is herself a poetess, though EBB claimed, rightly enough, I think, that the work was in no way to be understood as autobiographical. The plot is rather mid-Victorian Dickensian, in devolving upon (mainly Leftist) issues of social justice for the downtrodden poor and miserable in the tracing out of a star-crossed romantic intrigue between the London classes and other related misadventures. Whether or not it would have amounted to Dickens-class reading as prose is a matter, most unfortunately, difficult to discern amid the toils of a literary experiment in setting so much often mundane-proletarian matter to a poetry which, in all its lofty elegance, seems less often to elevate and illuminate its turns of plot than to crush and occlude them, as if bound to awkwardly, even bathetically, dignify in epic measure the ordinary doings of mews hostlers or chimney sweeps. Like over-instrumented music, the prodigy of embellishment makes it over-difficult to discern the simple authentic underlying tune. At least that was my impression; if experimentation was what EBB had in mind, I cannot confirm for myself that the experiment was altogether successful.

I suspect I am not the only one; I believe the critics of the time may also have often dealt unkindly with EBB, whose vivid, vigorous and marvellously incisive strophes did not always track true to the ear or taste of her time. In any case, she had a devoted, if unsung, fan in Emily Dickinson, whose even wilder uncouth uncanny style met with even less sympathy while she lived, which may or may not have been a credit to EBB, considering how many kinds of popular literature Emily omnivorously reveled in which one might think should have been beneath such a taste as hers. My verdict; an ambitiously unsuccessful literary sally, perhaps, yet too interesting to ignore, as an opus of a genuinely gifted poetess, full of handiwork uniquely marvellous enough, however ill-construed, to merit raking out of history's dustbin for continued admiration.
520117
Stuffing prose with adjectives and adverbs does not make it poetic. Whipsawing your readers between times, characters, points of view, etc, without explanation does not make your book deep, nor does it convincingly conjure magical realism.

A good general rule for writers is: The more complicated your ideas, the more simple and clear your prose should be. Reading this book made me long for the elegant and spare prose of Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five, which attempted much the same feat as this book, only it succeeded beautifully where The Vorrh stumbles anew with each confusing chapter.

I like experimental writing and Im not afraid of bizarre plots, weird characters, or alienating settings. I wanted so badly to let this book take me on a dazzling and hallucinatory journey. However, this book is more convoluted than avant-garde. Worse, the language is sloppy; Catling throws descriptors around, aiming for poetic imagery, but the images never coalsece, even if you read the sentence twice or three times. Ill leave you with this short sample from the first chapter, as its a perfect example of the writing youll encounter throughout the book:

"She had explained all this to me while I tried to serve her breakfast in bed on a rare rainy morning. The black bread and yellow butter had seemed to stare from its plate with mocking intensity, the fruit pulsating and warping into obscene ducts and ventricles. I perched on the edge of the bed, listening to her simple words glide with the rain, while my fear turned them into petrol, burning into my oxygenless, hidden core."

If you find this conjures images in your head, if you find it exalting, then ignore my negative review and buy this book. If you find it squishy, overwrought, and vague, skip The Vorrh.
1490243
I've been a fan of Clark Ashton Smith's short stories since I was in elementary school, but only recently stumbled across this collection of his poems.

To be honest, I wouldn't bother. These poems are flat-out unreadable. And I'm not a poetry snob, or an anti-poetry zealot. I read quite a bit of poetry in any range of style. It's just that Clark Ashton Smith is no poet. Oh, he rhymes nice and all, and has got a good sense of rhythm. He falls victim to the poet's disease of having to pick big, complicated words when more ordinary words will do, muddling meaning and leaving readers alosh in a swirl of words that might just as well have been picked randomly from the dictionary. I read the specific Star-Treader poem a number of times and just can't hack through the obtuse language -- and I really tried because I really wanted to like this, given its author. I plow through a lot of books in a lot of genres, and only rarely find a book as unreadable as this. It's good for the Clark Ashton Smith fan's library, but as a curiosity, not as a good read.

So "The Soul of the Sea," one of the poems in this collection, is all right. It's almost like the subject caught Smith off-guard so he didn't have a ready supply of Thees and Thous and Thines ready to pile on like bricks. . .
3263574
Although there is a lot of poetry here, I've only read it through once, and it lays on the bookcase shelf, unread again.  The textual material for teaching poetry writing did not interest me.  I'm not badmouthing the poetry here, but it fails to enchant the way Farrell's other anthologies which blend art with words so beautifully.
1834191
This book hasn't aged well.  There is very little plot, very little dialogue, and very few verbs.  (Seriously, there are stretches of five or six "sentences" in a row with nary a verb to be seen.)  There are some beautiful gems compacted into the dense prose, but for the most part Phillips crafted chewy, chunky, unwieldy sentences that don't give much pay-off for all the work you've done to decipher them.  I have a Masters in literature, I have read and understood Ulysses, but I had to give up on many of the incomprehensible lines here.  "I suck you up like erasers"?  What?

The subject matter has aged poorly, too.  In 2006, I'm neither shocked nor intrigued by Phillips's thinly veiled alter-ego's confrontation with her mother over birth control.

I can see why reviewers at the time were struck by the promise and poetry of her work; the story "1934" has the most plot in the collection, and is quite lovely.  But is she, as Nadine Gordimer wrote, "the best short-story writer since Eudora Welty"?

Umm, no.
4116770
I'm a poet.  I'm a dog lover.  I also very much enjoy quite a bit--but not all--of Mary Oliver's work.  so I thought, of course I'll love this book.

I pretty much hate it, and am glad it was a gift and I didn't pay for it myself.  First, it's sentimental, and no, that's not a good thing.  Sentimental=false emotion, and that's what this is book is full of.  Also, the dogs talk.  here's an example: " 'snort, snort,' said Henry. That's bad enough, but the language is so flat as to be simplistic.  I began to wonder if it was meant for children.  There were also lines like:  "A dog is adorable and noble./A dog is a true and loving friend." Seriously? This is the same Mary Oliver who penned Pulitzer prize winning poetry?

So my biggest problem was that it was simply not good poetry, or even particularly good writing on dogs, as it seemed to fall into all the tired tropes about dogs.  All that was enough to give it a bad review.

But then there is the author's repeated assertion that dogs that are on leashes aren't real dogs.  Instead they are "...a possession only, the ornament of a human life" and "can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost."  Excuse me?  A dog changes because an owner is responsible enough to keep their restrained when it is appropriate to do so?  Frankly, I suspect Mary Oliver may be the kind of dog owner I particularly dislike, the one whose free roaming dog comes roaring up to my leashed dogs while the owner casually says "he's friendly."  I know a bit about dogs, as it happens, and dog behavior and training too, and I know that dogs care interesting and can be noble and mysterious and appealing, and this is all true whether they are leashed or not, and I also know the problems free-roaming dogs can cause, especially for people how have reactive dogs who do not take kindly to loose dogs approaching them, and I find this assertion that dogs should not be leashed annoying and perhaps even irresponsible.

Let me be clear:  I would give the book 1 star even if I didn't disagree with the foolishness about leashed vs. unleashed dogs, but that was just the icing on the cake of my distaste for this book, I'm afraid.  And I also know it's hard to write about animals and avoid sentimentality, but that doesn't mean one should wallow in it either.  Give this one a miss.
2671142
While the text contains some real gems of Emersonian thought (i.e. Divinity School Address and Self-Reliance) it is not an adequate representation of his better works, leaving out "Nature," "The American Scholar" and other more important and influential essays.  I, personally, order this text for my Freshman English classes because it's cheap and gives two exemplary representations of Emerson for a survey course; however, if you are looking for a total package text that reflects what Emerson is capable of as a writer and thinker, you are better off investing a little more money and picking up a Norton or Library of America Edition of his works.