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• Current

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Type: poetry

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Status: favorite

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Author: Ted Hughes

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Tags: poetry

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Description: "Hughes has a great spiritual imagination - he is truly a visionary and a modern primitive.""Hughes has a great spiritual imagination - he is truly a visionary and a modern primitive." - Ian Sansom, London Review of Books...

2005-10-24

 

• Current

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Type: poetry

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Status: I recommend

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Author: Ted Kooser

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Tags: poetry plains midwest

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Description: 'There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially'There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser's work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems, a book of portraits and landscapes, Delights & Shadows. Every delight is shadowed by darkness in this book of small wonders and hard dualisms. The book begins with a poem called "Walking on Tiptoe" and ends with one entitled "A Happy Birthday." It takes an epigraph from Emily Dickinson -- "The Sailor cannot see the North, but knows the Needle can" -- but just as easily could have taken one from Wallace Stevens: "Death is the mother of beauty." Mortality is omnipresent and induces a deep attentiveness. Everyone here -- a young woman in a wheelchair, a skater dressed in black, a group of mourners after a funeral, the poet himself -- seems to be moving lightly over an invisible abyss. "There are days when the fear of death/ is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates/ everything," he writes in "Surviving." "Were it not for the way you taught me to look/ at the world, to see the life at play in everything," he writes to his mother who has been dead just one month, "I would have to be lonely forever."' - Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post...

2005-10-24

 

• Current

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Type: poetry

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Status: favorite

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Authors: Jim Harrison Ted Kooser

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Tags: poetry letters conversationalpoetry correspondence

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Description: Longtime friends, Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser always exchanged poems in their letter writing.Longtime friends, Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser always exchanged poems in their letter writing. After Kooser was diagnosed with cancer several years ago, Harrison found that his friend's poetry became "overwhelmingly vivid," and they began a correspondence comprised entirely of brief poems, "because that was the essence of what we wanted to say to each other."...

2005-10-24

  & 1 users

• Current

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Type: poetry

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Status: favorite

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Author: Adam Zagajewski

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Tags: poetry polish

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Description: "Zagajewski's poems pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from"Zagajewski's poems pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence. This is an astonishing book." - Philip Boehm, The New York Times Book Review...

2005-10-24

  & 2 users

• Current

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Type: poetry

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Status: I recommend

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Author: Philip Larkin

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Tags: british poetry

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Description: "More often than any other English poet since the war, Larkin gave us lines that it is"More often than any other English poet since the war, Larkin gave us lines that it is unlikely we'll be able to forget." - Ian Hamilton, The Times (London)...

2005-10-24