To the poetry skeptics, what have you got to lose?
Helping readers overcome their ambivalence about poetry.
As a fine poet in his own right and editor at large at the independent poetry press Wave Books as well as the poetry page editor at the New York Times Magazine, Zapruder (English/St. Mary’s Coll.; Sun Bear, 2014, etc.) is highly qualified to take on the age-old question. The author takes a personal approach, mixing memoir, analysis, and argument. As a high school senior in 1985, he dreaded the poetry unit. He picked W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” to analyze. After reading the opening lines, “something just clicked,” and he understood “that there was something only poetry could do.” After graduate work in Russian language and literature, Zapruder decided to pursue a degree in creative writing and never looked back. Now, he wants to share his love and knowledge of poetry. Even if readers won’t feel like the “top[s] of [their] head[s] were taken off,” as Emily Dickinson described it, Zapruder hopes to show how “poetry creates the poetic state of mind in a reader” through a poem’s form, its leaps of association, and how it plays with the nature of language itself. He first guides readers through literal readings of three poems to demonstrate how to read a poem and dig down into its core to freely enjoy the poem for what it is. Zapruder’s writing is accessible, easygoing, and welcoming, as if he’s sitting right there talking us through the poems. Throughout, he uses numerous poems to clearly explain how each achieves something unique. His discussion of the enigma of line breaks is first-rate. He writes about how he fell in love with W.S. Merwin’s dark and often surreal collection The Lice (1967) and how a Frank O’Hara poem, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” now helps him “in this time of crisis, and beyond.”
To the poetry skeptics, what have you got to lose?Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-234307-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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