ClimbingSky

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POETRY REVIEWS

  • Poetry Review: “The Poet and the Bird” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

    Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a great influence on Emily Dickinson. Not, of course, in language or style but more in temperament. Certainly the wordiness of Barret Browning bears little in common with the spareness of a typical Dickinson poem. It is easy to see why Dickinson would have gravitated to Barret Browning. Her playfulness of… Read more

  • Poetry Review: Matsuo Basho

    Matsuo Basho was the most famous poet of his day (1644-1694). He is considered the greatest master of the haiku form. His haikus may be the most well-known and most-translated. For those of us who do not read Japanese, we can only read him in translation. The subtle differences in translating his small poems from… Read more

  • Poetry Review: “Consolation” by Wislawa Szymborska

    Wislawa Szymborska won the Noble Prize for literature in 1996 “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” The irony of such an academic description of Szmborska’s poetry, that is anything but academic and imprecise is, I am guessing, completely lost on the… Read more

  • Friday’s Food For Thought: Auden on Poetry

    [Those who complain about the ambiguity or obscurity of modern poetry] “should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.” ~ W. H. Auden Read more

  • Poetry Review: “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” by John Milton

    Milton wrote this poem in 1629 at the age of 21. It is often considered his first great poem in English. It is poetically and theologically pure Milton. It is also the best Christmas poem ever written. For 40 years now, I have re-read this poem on Christmas Eve. It is as close to a… Read more

  • Poetry Review: “Christmas Party at South Danbury Church” by Donald Hall

    I have not gone to many poetry readings. Those few I have attend have left me cold. Bothered invariably by the demeanor of the poet and/or of the audience. Poetry should be read aloud, but poets and audiences should be matched carefully. Only those who know the poet for the bag-of-gas he or she truly… Read more

  • Poetry Review: “Seeing for a Moment” by Denise Levertov

    I have always thought of Denise Levertov as intimidating. Looking back at a volume of her poetry I am not completely sure why that is. At first glance, she does not seem anymore or less accessible than a dozen other poets I can think of. And yet she does intimidate. Theology and philosophy are constant… Read more

  • Book Review:Homage to Robert Frost by Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott

    Robert Frost is the most American of all American poets. He is American in subject, sound, and sensibility. It is his great strength and his greatest weakness. While Whitman’s propheticness transcended his American-ness, Frost can make no such claim to a transcendent universality. In the end he remains Poet Americanus. That is what makes this volume of essays… Read more

  • Poetry Review: “Winter Night” by Boris Pasternak

    We inherit from our parents much that flows beneath the surface of our immediate awareness: temperment, personality, ways of looking at and moving through the world. My mother watched virtually no television and only occasionally went to movies or watched them on tv. One movie that she did love though was Doctor Zhivago. She also loved… Read more

  • Book Review: The Dyer’s Hand by W.H. Auden

    More than any poet, I associate Auden with mountains because that is where I first seriously read him. I carried a volume of his selected poems into the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness when I worked trail crew there for the United States Forest Service during summers in the early 1980s. In the evenings, after everyone else went… Read more