Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

 

Do you enjoy reading poetry?  I haven’t read much poetry since college, but reading this collection made me think I need to pick up poetry again.

I read this collection of poetry in January for the What the Dickens Book Club on Facebook.  There was a great discussion about it last month. 

My thoughts on this collection:

·       I haven’t read any Robert Frost poem since my college days.  I either read his poems as individual poems or as part of a “complete collection.”  This was the first time I read them in a collection as they would have been published.  It was very interesting.

·       The collection includes one of my favorite poems, The Road Not Taken.

·       The poems give the reader a sense of place and time – that you are living on a farm in rural Vermont in the early twentieth century.

·       I especially liked the poem where a city guy tried to rip Frost off and buy one thousand pine trees for a total of $300.  This would only be three cents per tree!  It was interesting how Frost made this experience into a poem.

·       Poems are a nice length to read and think about before bed.  With all that is going on in the world, they were a good escapism read.

Overall, Mountain Interval by Robert Frost was an enjoyable poetry collection and I highly recommend it.

Book Source:  Purchased on my kindle from Amazon.com.

The Late Wisconsin Spring by John Koethe

 

The Late Wisconsin Spring is a book of poems published by the Princeton Legacy Library.  I haven’t read much poetry since my college days so I thought I would open up my horizons and read something different.  This collection contained mostly sad poems on what could have been and how the things could be different if another path had been chosen.  I thought they were well written and there were many beautiful lines that I’ve shared below.

Each One as She May

“One life is enough.  One private story

Lived out on a summer day.”

“For life is reading and respite from reading,

And living in a vague idea of where the others are,

Or in dreams, or in these simple versions of the past.”

Picture of Little Letters

“Afterwards.  The words meander through the mirror

But I don’t want them now, I don’t want these abbreviations.

What I want in poetry is a kind of abstract photography

Of the nerves, but what I like photography

Is the poetry of literal pictures of the neighborhood.”

Dark Bedroom

“And a beautiful moon fills the sky with transparent light.

Where is that happiness I knew so many years ago?

Or was it only casual fears held in the passing

Solitude of recollection, here under the summer stars?”

Overall, and interesting book of poetry with some beautiful lines and sentiments.

Book Source:  The Kewaunee Public Library

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

The entire title of this book is Trigger Warning:  Short Fictions and Disturbances, which paints a very accurate picture of this book.  I loved these unique short stories by master story teller Neil Gaiman.  Although I made the mistake of taking this book camping, and a few of the stories freaked me out  . . . but would be perfect to terrorize your friends around the fire.  I also loved the variety from fairy tales, horror, Doctor Who to poems; this collection has a little bit of something for everyone.

I really appreciated that Gaiman wrote a great introduction which included the inspiration behind each story or poem.  I found myself often flipping back to this section after I read the story to get an even deeper understanding.

I am going to summarize a few of my favorite stories in this collection.

The Thing About Cassandra

A young artist is given odd news when his friends tell him that they ran into his first girlfriend, Cassandra.  The thing about Cassandra was that he made her up to impress his buddies.  Who is the mysterious Cassandra?  I originally read this story in Songs of Love and Death and I’ll admit I’m still pleasantly puzzled by the end.  I’m putting this book on my husband’s reading pile so I have someone to discuss the end with.

Down to a Sunless Sea

Down to a Sunless Sea is a gritty story of a mother waiting for her young sailor son to return.  One of my favorite quotes was “Nobody drinks it, neither the rainwater nor the river water. They make jokes about Thames water killing you instantly, and it is not true.”  I cannot resist a good water quality quote.

The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains

I loved this story.  I read it twice as the beginning made much more sense once all of the pieces of the story were put together.  A dwarf seeks young Calum MacInnes to help him find a mystical mountain with a cave of cursed gold to use for the “King across the seas” cause.  Or is this his true purpose?  I loved this take on revenge.

Orange

I liked the unique format to this story, which were only the answers to an investigator’s written questionnaire.

The Case of Death and Honey

This was a very interesting Sherlock tale of him trying to solve the ultimately mystery, how to defeat death.  I quite enjoyed it.

Click-Clack the Rattlebag

This story freaked me out.  It is a scary story about an old house and what lies within it.  I liked the format of a young boy telling the story leading up to the grand realization at the end.

Nothing O’Clock

This is a Doctor Who story set during the Matt Smith Doctor Who time period.  It was a perfect Doctor Who story – interesting, a bit of humor and a bit of horror on the situation of human race after the evil Kin try to take over Earth.

Diamonds and Pearls:  A Fairy Tale

I love fairy tales.  This modified version of Cinderella was unique and very interesting.

The Sleeper and the Spindle

The Sleeper and the Spindle is a modified fairy tale mash-up of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.  I thought it was an interesting take on both fairy tales and I loved the strong female protagonist.  I would love to read more of Gaiman’s fairy tales.

Black Dog

I need to read American Gods.  Even though I haven’t read it, I still enjoyed this tale.  Shadow is in a Pub in England and gets involved with a local couple.  The man is having health problems so he helps them out.  They are followed home by the local legend, a black dog.  Shadow digs deeper to solve the mystery of this superstition. 

Overall, I enjoyed all of the stories in this collection.  I liked how imaginative they were and very original.  I liked how they hopped from scary stories to fairy tales.  These were the type of stories I especially loved as a teenager and miss reading at times.  I need to look for more like this.  Any suggestions?

Book Source:  Review Copy from William Morrow – Thanks!

Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson

I bought a small collection of the Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson from a book order when I was in high school. During April, I reread this collection to celebrate Emily Dickinson month in the Victorian Challenge. I enjoyed the preface, which gave a brief account of Dickinson, her life, and what is known of her writing the poems.

I loved reading the poems themselves. They are short poems, but yet Dickinson captured the essence of wonder about death, love, and life. I don’t know best how to describe my love for the poems, but I think the poems talk for themselves. A few of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems are below with my brief thoughts.

I think I feel like this every day . . .

I felt a clearing in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.

I think this was my favorite poem as a teenager. I think everyone knows what it is like to be a nobody.

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell you name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

I have loved this poem since I was a teenager as well. The last two lines are so well known now. I think it can mean many things to different people. Parting from a romantic love, especially when you are the one left behind. But it can also signify to me at least, losing someone you love through death.

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson also wrote a lot of nature poems. I like dandelions and the following poem struck a chord with me.

The Dandelion’s pallid tube
Astonishes the Grass,
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas –
The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower, -
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o’er.

As a fan of the written word, I loved this poem about the power of a word.

There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man.
It hurls its barbed syllables, -
At once is mute again.

But where it fell

The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted brother
Gave his breath away.

Wherever runs the breathless sun,
Wherever roams the day,
There is its noiseless onset,
There is its victory!

Behold the keenest marksman!
The most accomplished shot!
Time’s sublimest target
Is a soul ‘forgot’!

I LOVE the following poem and I think that it describes Emily Dickinson and the power she still has on us. She may have lived a reclusive life and never tried to be in the light of fame, but you can not put her fire out.

You cannot put a fire out;

A thing that can ignite

Can go, itself, without a fan
Upon the slowest night.

You cannot fold a flood
And put it in a drawer, -
Because the winds would find it out,
And tell you cedar floor.

What are you favorite Dickinson poems?

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson a Guest Blog by Author and Scholar Jerome Charyn

Emily Dickinson died more than 125 years ago, yet it is as if she’s usurped our landscape and our language – Emily is everywhere.

Last week an article about the virtues of walking one’s dog appeared in the New York Times, bearing the cryptic title: “Started Early, Took my Dog.” The author had burglarized one of Emily’s poems, and never even mentioned her - or Carlo, the wondrous Newfoundland who accompanied Emily for sixteen years.

It was while mourning Carlo that she began to wear white. She was lost without her mute Confederate. But that’s another matter.

Started Early, Took my Dog. We don’t even have to attribute her lines anymore. She’s become one of the most poignant icons of our new century – a full-blooded renegade -rather than a reclusive spinster with red hair – or a helpless agoraphobic trapped in a room in her father’s house.

Last year Holland Cotter, an art critic for the New York Times, wrote about this metamorphosis in an article entitled, "My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst.” Her upstairs bedroom was no secret sanctuary; it was “an empowerment zone.” [I felt that same power when I first visited her room in 2008, a kind of crazy thrill.]

Thirty-five years ago Emily was still the Belle of Amherst, as personified by Julie Harris, a harmless, asexual mouse. The play by William Luce was an enormous success, and it might have crippled Emily forever if Julie Harris hadn’t found other roles to play.

But around the same time that Belle romped around in her white dress, the late Adrienne Rich worked on one of the most perceptive essays ever written on Emily Dickinson – “Vesuvius at Home.” Rich dealt with Emily Dickinson as one poet contemplating another. She understood the depth of the problem. We’d turned Emily into some kind of “gnomic Garbo,” sentimentalized her in our own private menagerie of five or six poems. “I have come to imagine her as somehow too strong for her environment, a figure of powerful will, not at all frail or breathless.” Nineteenth-century women had no voice; intelligence was a curse for any female.

Dickinson invented “a language more varied, more compressed, more dense with implications, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date.” I would ever go further than that. She has wormed her way into the psyche of the West.

Harold Bloom hated to teach her, because looking at her poems with his students always gave him a headache – it’s a headache I’d love to have. And Bloom admits in The Western Canon that “except for Shakespeare, Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante.” I see her as a kind of female Hamlet with daggers in her mind. She’s murderous and playful, and ultimately unknowable. And her language shifts from second to second, so that we’re never standing on solid ground. Consider Hamlet driving Polonius a little crazy as he compares a cloud to a camel, then to a weasel and a whale. All we would have to is supply the dashes, and we’d be right inside one of Emily’s electric whirlwinds.

But finally, it’s a whirlwind all her own. That’s why we celebrate her again – and again.

’Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch

* * *

Not all Pianos in the Woods

Had power to mangle me —

* * *
I started Early – Took my Dog –

And visited the Sea –

The Mermaids in the Basement

Came out to look at me –
* * *

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—

As if my Brain had split—

I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—

But could not make it fit.



The thought behind, I strove to join

Unto the thought before—

But Sequence ravelled out of Sound

Like Balls—upon a Floor.

* * *

No one else on earth could have written those last two lines – these are her bolts of Melody, her invisible signature.

As Brenda Wineapple tells us in White Heat: “ . . . language like this had never been seen before; nothing like it, really, ever appeared again.” Emily was, according to Wineapple, a woman of secrets, who wanted her secrets kept but wanted you to know she had them: “. . . she seemed to exist outside of time, untouched by it. And that’s unnerving. No wonder we make up stories about her: about her lovers, if any, or how many, or why she turned her back on ordinarily life and when she knew the enormity of her own gift (of course she knew) and how she combined words in ways we never imagined and wished we could.”

Everyone seems to have his or her own version of Emily. In Aife Murray’s new book, Maid as Muse, we have a marvelous menagerie of ghosts – Emily’s servants, named and unnamed. Aife Murray relies on her own Irish roots to rescue these servants from oblivion, and she also rescues their habitat – that architecture of the unseen, where these servants labored and some of them lived – like Margaret Maher, who came to work for the Dickinson in 1869 and had a tiny room above the kitchen. Warm and wild and mighty, as Emily called her, she’s the real heroine of the text. It seems that Emily stored her “fascicles – her forty hand-sewn booklets of poems – in Margaret’s trunk. This explodes the whole notion of Dickinson’s “Immortality,” whether she ever wanted these booklets to be seen by another soul.

Why was Margaret the only one in Amherst who knew about the existence of these booklets and the rest of her mistress’ menagerie – that secret stash of poems. Emily wasn’t cavalier about other things. She left her own will and instructions about her burial – six Irish handymen from the Homestead were to carry her remains to the burial ground. But she left no instructions, to her own sister or her sister-in-law, Susan, about the most important matters of her life. Margaret didn’t burn this stash, as Emily had instructed her to do, and now, we have these poems, the wondrous shards of Emily’s existence, almost by accident.

Emily was an aberration, a female poet, who survived that terrible winter of nineteenth-century New England, where women weren’t allowed to think for themselves or reveal their own rage.

- Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn's most recent novel is The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. He is currently working on a study of the reclusive poet for Harvard University Press.

 Contact the author through the Facebook Page dedicated to Emily Dickinson in the 21st Century: http://www.facebook.com/SecretLifeOfEmilyDickinson

If you would like to see more about this blog, it goes with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZpXxBJRbXM (blog was taken from his recent talk at The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.)

Thank-you Jerome Charyn for this great guest post!  I can't wait to read The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson!

April Posts for the Victorian Challenge – Emily Dickinson Month!

I hope everyone is enjoying spring so far! It has been a very hectic one for me and I have gotten behind on posting on Laura’s Reviews. I’m working on catching up, but I now find that half of April has passed me by and I have yet to put the link up for April’s posts. I apologize! We are finally closing the reviews on the month of March– Robert Louis Stevenson month. We had a total of 21 reviews. I listened to the audiobooks The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island by Stevenson. I also watched Muppet Treasure Island with my family. I was hoping to read and watch Kidnapped, but alas, I ran out of time.

Fittingly for National Poetry Month, April is Emily Dickinson month for the Victorian Challenge 2012. You can post any Victorian related item you like this month, but I am going to focus on Emily Dickinson and you are allowed to focus with me! We will hopefully have two guest blog posts on the Emily Dickinson before the end of the month also to celebrate. Please post your April reviews below in Mr. Linky (and not on the January, February, or March link-up). If you haven’t signed up for the challenge yet, go to this sign-up link.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American Poet born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830. After going to school at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson returned home to live the rest of her days as a recluse in white. Most of her relationships were carried about by letter, and she also wrote almost two thousand poems through the course of her life. Less than a dozen of these poems were published during her lifetime and they were considered radical poems for the Victorian era. Dickinson died in 1886. Her poems have been continuously in print since 1891.

It has been quite some time since I’ve read any of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. I have a collection of her poetry buried in one of my bookcases. I’m going to hunt it down this weekend and read it. Do you plan on reading any Dickinson this month? If so, what works of or about Emily Dickinson interest you?

I look forward to reading your reviews this month!

Please post the name of your blog followed by the item you reviewed. For example, Laura’s Reviews (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson).



The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte Edited from Manuscripts by C.W. Hatfield

I’ll admit that I really wanted to read Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte), but I couldn’t find a copy in my library system anywhere. Has anyone else read the first publication of the Bronte sisters? Searching through the system, I noticed a lot of different versions of Emily’s poems, but none by the other sisters. I chose to read The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte edited from Manuscripts by C.W. Hatfield. After reading The Brontes: A Beginner’s Guide by Steve Eddy, I discovered that critically, Emily’s poems are the most beloved of the sisters’ as they are the most original. Thus the reason why I had troubles finding poems by Anne and Charlotte.


I will tell the truth, I am not the world’s greatest fan of poetry. While I appreciate a good poem, and especially loved learning about them in school, I don’t make a habit of picking up books of poetry to read. I enjoyed reading Emily’s poems, but I am unable to offer a great critical review of them myself.

While the poems were enjoyable and beautiful to read, the most fascinating part of the book to me was the Introduction by C.W. Hatfield. In this introduction, Hatfield discusses his process of tracking down and finding Emily’s original poems. After the death of all of the Brontes, Charlotte’s husband, Arthur Bell Nichols, moved to Ireland and eventually remarried. Over the years, the manuscripts of the sisters in his possession and then his wife’s, were parceled and sold off, especially after Bell Nichols death in 1906. As the Bronte sisters and their brother Branwell had very similar handwriting, some poems were attributed to the wrong sister when they were published. Words and grammar were also changed through the years by different publishers. Hatfield worked to track down the original of all of Emily’s poems and to put them back together in the way they were when originally written. Over the years he was able to find many different poems never published before that were scattered around the world on original manuscripts. I found it all to be fascinating.

Many of Emily Bronte’s poems were written for the fictional world of Gondal, an island that Emily and Anne invented and wrote stories and poems about from children to adults. Sadly, none of the Gondal stories have survived, but Fannie Ratchford has a section in this book where she tries to put together as much about this world has she can using their poems, a short journal fragment, and letters exchanged between Emily and Anne. Ratchford has an outline of the reconstructed epic of Gondal and gives a brief description that makes the heading of the poems make more sense.

Irene Taylor wrote a great introduction and obviously loves the work of Emily Jane Bronte and thinks that Wuthering Heights is also a masterpiece. Curiously she also calls Villette Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece. While I enjoy Villette, I think myself and most people consider Jane Eyre her masterpiece. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

It was interesting reading Emily Bronte’s poems. I found myself wishing often that I knew more about the Gondal epic so that I could really understand the background of some of the characters, but the prose itself was beautiful. The poems often touch on sadness and despair, loneliness and heartache. Emily was not one to write cheerful poetry, but isn’t poetry often melancholy? I found that I preferred her non-Gondal poems and found them to be much more powerful.

I liked many of the poems, but I’ll conclude with one that I particularly enjoyed, labeled A26:

O thy bright eyes must answer now,
When Reason, with a scornful brow,
Is mocking at my overthrow;
O thy sweet tongue must plead for me
And tell why I have chosen thee!

Stern Reason is to judgement come
Arrayed in all her forms of gloom:
Wilt though my advocate be dumb?
No, radiant angel, speak and say
Why I did cast the world away;

Why I have persevered to shun
The common paths that others run;
And on a strange road journeyed on
Heedless alike of Wealth and Power –
Of Glory’s wreath and Pleasure’s flower.

These once indeed seemed Beings divine,
And they perchance heard vows of mine
And saw my offerings on their shrine –
But, careless gifts are seldom prized,
And mine were worthily despised;

So with a ready heart I swore
To seek their altar-stone no more,
And gave my spirit to adore
Thee, ever present, phantom thing –
My slave, my comrade, and my King!

A slave because I rule thee still;
Incline thee to my changeful will
And make thy influence good or ill –
A comrade, for by day and night
Thou art my intimate delight –

My Darling Pain that wounds and sears
And wrings a blessing out from tears
Be deadening me to real cares;
And yet, a king – though prudence well
Have taught thy subject to rebel.

And am I wrong to worship where
Faith cannot doubt nor Hope despair
Since my own soul can grant my prayer?
Speak, God of Visions, plead for me
And tell why I have chosen thee!

This is my third item for the Victorian Challenge 2012.

Book Source: The Kewaunee Public Library