Rate this book

Good Poems: American Places (2011)

by Garrison Keillor(Favorite Author)

4.12 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0670022543 (ISBN13: 9780670022540)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Viking Adult

review 1: This book has been riding with me in the door pocket of the car for six months or more. Turns out that reading poetry while taking a short drive, provided someone else is driving, is a most wonderful activity. Read a poem. Chuckle or muse while watching passing landscape, share the poem with someone whose hands are on the wheel aka captive audience. How else is someone who doesn't read poetry going to get his recommended dose? Wendell Barry's poem "They Sit Together on the Porch" is a favorite, among many. Also, Linda McCarriston's "Riding Out at Evening" with the lines: And who is to say it is useless/or foolish to ride out in the falling light/alone, wishing, or praying/for particular good to particular beings,/on one small road in a huge world?/The horse bears me along,... more like grace,/making me better than what I am,/and what I think or say or see/is whole in these moments, is neither/small nor broken.
review 2: Keillor’s latest anthology is an American travelogue in poetry. Travel not just in the context of place, but also time, history. As the title states, these poems are uniquely American, a celebration of cities, suburbs, cornfields, oceans, and weather. There is an entire section of poems titled Snow, another titled Out West, another titled Ocean Brine. Contemporary poets predominate, many of them not yet widely known.Cerise Press published an interview with Thomas Lux in the summer 2009 issue. Sally Molini asked Lux about accessible poems. Lux’s response, partially quoted below, describes the poems in this anthology; they are hospitable, and they invite the reader to experience the slice of America the poet describes. Billy Collins says he prefers the word “hospitable” rather than accessible. I think I do too. There’s plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality,wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles. (Thomas Lux)The anthology format makes it difficult to select favorite poems to quote, as there are simply too many wondrous snapshots. In his introduction, Keillor states, “This is a book of poems in which the poet simply is carried away by a particular place in America.” Now it’s your turn. Enter over 400 pages of reverence for an American place, and prepare to be carried away. less

Download links for: Good Poems: American Places

Advertising