Academy Of American Poets

This is an anthology that will help you cry and soothe you at the same time!

I have been subscribed to poets.org for the longest time. Not only am I a huge fan of the poems they send, but it is amazing to be be able to go and read a poem on the site. Sometimes your heart needs a certain poem and it’s fantastic to be able to access it so quickly! When I found out that this book was being published by the same people, I knew it would be amazing and reading it did not change my mind!

The anthology is split into five sections, each covering an overarching theme such as grief, the body, desire, etc. It took me a few minutes to understand but when I did I fell in love with the titles of these sections! I think I was slow on the uptake because the only one I was immediately familiar with was ‘Practice Losing Further, Losing Faster.’

This review is not very objective, because as it so happens I needed the third and the fifth poems quite badly. And while the book had quite a few that I've read before and loved, I was also introduced to some fantastic new ones that I'll turn to in the future!

I should also admit that I prefer anthologies like this one over collections that are purely one poet. If you really love a poet I'm sure you'll love an entire book comprised of just them, but anthologies such as this one are the ones that give you comfort and introduce you to those poets. To steal the music analogy from this book, sometimes an entire album by an artist might not work for you, but a song by them on the right playlist will!… (lisätietoja)

Tyrants fear the poet.
from In This Place by Amanda Gorman

Poetry that matters. Of course I had to read it. Inside I found well-loved verses and new poems that left their imprint. What matters? Being alive here in this world. Justice. Love. Nature. Embracing all of life, its joys and its sorrows, our youth and our age. Freedom. Dignity. It’s all in these poems.

How should we live? The first poem, On Living by Nazim Hikmet, encourages us to “live with great seriousness,” planting a tree at seventy, embracing life, proclaiming that “we must live as if we will never die.” In Failing and Flying, Jack Gilbert offers that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” suggesting that “Icarus was not failing as he fell, just coming to the end of his triumph.”

Life has its grief. Yet, Philip Larkin reminds in An Arundel Tomb, “What will survive of us is love.” We call out for justice. “You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise,” May Angelou proclaims. In I Can’t Breathe, Pamela Sneed decries the deaths of black men. We are called to protect the Earth which offers “The Peace of Wild Things“, as Wendell Berry reminds us. Celebrate your body and its desire.

You will find poems by Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Bishop, E. E. Cummings and Emily Dickinson, Louse Gluck and Amanda Gorman, Seamus Heaney and Langton Hughes, Amy Lowell and Federico Garcia Lorca, Marianne Moore an Sharon Olds, Mary Olive and Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke and Rumi, Sappho and Alfred Lord Tennyson, Phillis Wheatley and Walk Whitman.

Its an inspiring volume.

I received an ARC from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.… (lisätietoja)