BOOK REVIEWS
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If I were ever to teach a class to aspiring American poets, I would have one required text: the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Hemingway famously wrote in The Green Hills of Africa that all modern American fiction comes from one book, Huckleberry Finn. A similar thing can be said for Walt Whitman and the 1855 edition of Leaves Read more
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It is the unflagging beauty of the writing, day after day, that confirms [Thoreau’s Journals] greatness among writers’ journals. ~ Alfred Kazin I have posted here before that I read and reread Thoreau’s journals the same way I read and reread W.B. Yeats and a few other poets For grounding.. Thoreau’s Journals read like prose poetry. It Read more
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“A strange land we wandered to eastern horizonsWhere blueness of mountains swam in their blue–In blue beyond name.” Robert Penn Warren is probably remembered more today as a novelist than as a poet. While it is true that he did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his famous novel All the King’s Men, he actually Read more
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At first blush, the marriage between Ovid, that most Latin of poets, and Ted Hughes would seem as unlikely a match as any you could imagine. Not in ability, of course, but in language and temperament. Hughes as a poet has always seemed to me one of the most earthy, physical, and Anglo-Saxon of all Read more
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The best way to learn about poetry is to read poetry, and to read poets talking about it. With that in mind, over the next month I will be highlighting a number of books that feature poets talking about poetry, beginning with the book Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982–88 by Donald Hall. The greatest challenge in reviewing Read more
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George Bellairs was the nom de plume of Harold Blundell (1902–1982), a crime writer and bank manager born in Lancashire. This is the first of his works that I have read. The Dead Shall be Raised was first published in 1942. It begins with London-based Inspector Thomas Littlejohn going to spend a quiet Christmas holiday in the small town of Hatterworth where his Read more
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I decided this Christmas to reread the familiar Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol. I would guess that I last read it some 40-plus years ago. I wonder if there is a single work of fiction that has had more different adaptations of it filmed over the years. I highly doubt it. The familiar character of Scrooge has become (along with such literary characters as Sherlock Read more
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Rex Stout (1886-1975) is best known of course for his Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin Series. In total, Stout wrote 33 novels and 39 novellas or short stories featuring the pair between 1934 and 1975. I have read a lot of them. But certainly not all of them. “The Santa Claus Beat” was a complete surprise. Quite unlike Read more
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Patricia Moyes (1923-2000) was born in Dublin. She is best known for her Inspector Henry Tibbett Series. This is the first Moyes story that I think I have ever read. And it was a good one. I found it in the anthology Merry Murder. “Who Killed Father Christmas?” can best be described as sort of Read more
ClimbingSky 