Czeslaw Milosz has a captivating mind. In Native Realm he invites readers to join him on what his subtitle calls “A Search for Self-Definition,” and is a journey from the wooded interior of what is today Lithuania, where he was born into a family of Polish-speaking gentry, through his young adulthood in interwar Warsaw, past …
Category: Poetry
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/26/native-realm-by-czeslaw-milosz/
Jul 22 2022
Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney
Seeing Things returns to a greater length, though many of its poems — particularly the 48 in Part II, “Squarings” — are short; the squarings are all twelve lines each. “Glanmore Revisited” offers seven sonnets in its short sequence. “The Schoolbag” is also sonnet length, while “1.1.1987” and “An August Night” are three lines each. Compact …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/22/seeing-things-by-seamus-heaney/
Feb 25 2022
The Triumph of Achilles by Louise Glück
Only having read The Odyssey could be a bit of a hindrance in addressing a collection titled The Triumph of Achilles, especially when my notes show that that the title poem is one that struck me as I was reading through. Even without commanding the details of The Illiad, though, I liked the considerations Glück …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/25/the-triumph-of-achilles-by-louise-gluck/
Feb 23 2022
Selected Poems 1966–1987 by Seamus Heaney
The receipt tucked away in the pages of this collection tells me that I bought it in early 1997, in Washington, DC. At that time, I would only have read Heaney’s Nobel lecture. His Beowulf, the first poetic work of his that I read, was still two years from publication. There’s another receipt in the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/23/selected-poems-1966-1987-by-seamus-heaney/
Feb 06 2022
The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney followed his longest collection, Station Island, with one of his shortest, The Haw Lantern. Like several of his other collections, The Haw Lantern has a tripartite structure; unlike the others that I have read so far, its sections are not explicitly marked. Nevertheless, the ten sonnets that Heaney wrote in memory of his …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/06/the-haw-lantern-by-seamus-heaney/
Dec 17 2021
Spílexm: A Weaving Of Recovery, Resilience, And Resurgence by Nicola I. Campbell
Hrm, well, if I’d known this was essentially a memoir by a woman in her 40s, I would have probably skipped it (as I do for memoirs by men in their 30s, and for roughly the same reasons.) I feel that the 40s are a bad age for a woman to try to do a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/17/spilexm-a-weaving-of-recovery-resilience-and-resurgence-by-nicola-i-campbell/
Dec 12 2021
Station Island by Seamus Heaney
I still struggle with a notion I first mentioned when writing about Heaney’s inaugural collection, Death of a Naturalist, the idea that with each collection of poetry I should take time to live with it, read through several times, maybe even commit bits to memory so as to have them always at the ready. I …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/12/station-island-by-seamus-heaney/
Oct 06 2021
Turning To Wallpaper: Poems And Art by Heidi Wong
Wow, this book is a gut punch, in several very excellent ways. First, ofc, there’s the art, all by Heidi Wong, which is primarily dark to macabre. My review copy was a black and white Kindle version, so there’s only so much I can say about something I can’t observe in its full glory, but …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/06/turning-to-wallpaper-poems-and-art-by-heidi-wong/
Sep 19 2021
Descending Figure by Louise Glück
Glück divides Descending Figure into three sections, “The Garden,” “The Mirror,” and “Lamentations,” though I cannot say that I found the division particularly helpful or enlightening. Certainly there is a lot of lamenting in the final section, but there is a lot of it in the rest of the collection as well. This is a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/19/descending-figure-by-louise-gluck/
Sep 16 2021
Rooms Of The Mind by Makenzie Campbell
There’s a huge caveat to my review of this book today: I got an e-galley for Kindle, which was so strangely formatted as to make me constantly second guess whether I was reading a new poem or a continuation of the last one every few stanzas. This pervading doubt is not terribly conducive to enjoyment …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/16/rooms-of-the-mind-by-makenzie-campbell/