Feb 25 2022
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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/
Sep 11 2021
This is not real. We’ve seen it all before. Slow down, you’re screaming. What exploded? When? I guess this means we’ve got ourselves a war. And look at — Lord have mercy, not again. I heard that they went after Air Force One. Call FAA at once if you can’t land. They say the bastards …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/11/twenty-years-on/
Aug 31 2021
In contrast to the choice he made for North, Seamus Heaney left the poems in Field Work as a continuous furrow, not divided into parts. Sections still emerge naturally from his arrangement of the poems. The ten “Glenmore Sonnets” give the collection a firm spine running straight up and down the middle of this body …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/08/31/field-work-by-seamus-heaney/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire