ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

POETRY REVIEWS

  • POETRY REVIEW: “Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith” by Mary Oliver

    The tradition of the Nature Poem in American Literature is as old as American poetry itself. In a land of vast distances and grand landscapes, nature imprints itself “naturally” into the American psyche and self-understanding. It would not be an exaggeration to declare that there are really only two subjects for a truly “American” poet:… Read more

  • POETRY REVIEW: “Depressed by a Bad Book of Poetry” by James Wright

    James Wright spent a great deal of time in the North Country. He knew the want of hard-winters as well as the bountiful beauty of easy springs: physically, spiritually, and emotionally. (Wright, like so many poets – all poets? – suffered from depression.) Many of his best poems are about the beauty of nature, at… Read more

  • POETRY REVIEW: “The Question” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Today’s poem, “The Question,” has long been one of my favorite Shelley poems. It embodies for me the very essence of the Romantic. Indeed, if I were to teach a class on the Romantic poets, I think I might begin with “The Question.” Simply for the fact that it so perfectly brings together all the elements… Read more

  • POETRY REVIEW: “Lines Written in Early Spring” by William Wordsworth

    As a very amateur bird watcher living in the North Country, the surest sign of spring for me is the return of Red Wing blackbirds. Their trill-trilling from marshy areas is a song without compare. Here is a poem by Wordsworth about spring and birds and so much more. Enjoy!   Lines Written in Early… Read more

  • THROWBACK THURSDAY: “Making Certain It Goes On” by Richard Hugo

    Here in the North Country Richard Hugo’s name does not come up in many discussions. He is a Western poet after all, not a Midwestern one. There is a difference: in tone, subject, and in edginess. Hugo’s volume of collected poetry takes its title from this poem. “Making Certain It Goes On” is one of his… Read more

  • POETRY REVIEW: “How to Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry

      Wendell Berry is a writer and an activist. He has written novels, short-stories, essays, and books of non-fiction on subjects as varied as farming, economics, politics, and Christianity. Yet in the end, he is a lyric poet. I have certainly not read all of his prose work, but enough to suggest that it is… Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes

    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

  • POETRY REVIEW: “After Long Silence” by Jane Hirshfield

    Silence is where poetry is born. I have long wondered if my preference for books and poetry is based in part on the fact that I was born with hearing defect and something called Central Auditory Processing Disorder. A number of surgeries and hospital stays when I was young, fixed the hearing defect. The Central… Read more

  • POETRY REVIEW: “Another” by Hayden Carruth

    Poetry moves on a pendulum of influence, between nature and the political (Poetry of Beauty/Poetry of Justice). A few great poets like Yeats can inhabit and influence both dialectical poles, moving from pole to pole one poem at a time. Most poets are most comfortable, most at home, toward one end of the long pendulum swing or the other. A prolific… Read more

  • POETRY REVIEW: “In Bleak Midwinter” by Christina Rossetti

    After a brown Christmas, winter has come again to the North Country. The past two winters have not been the kind of winter we are used to here in the North Country. Though it is difficult today to say what a “typical” winter in Minnesota really is now, deep snow is what remember. Climate change… Read more