Odyssey Online

Entries Tagged as 'Recommended Book'

Poems Work

April 21st, 2014 · Comments Off on Poems Work

In honor of national poetry month (and because it is a peaceful slowly unwinding Monday morning) I typed Poems Work into our SLU Libraries Encore search, and, my goodness, did I get back an interesting list of books.  So interesting I did indeed feel motivated to blog out what poems work.  Here is a baker’s dozen from this serendipitous phrase:

 

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

George Herbert

April 16th, 2014 · Comments Off on George Herbert

Writing in The Guardian Nicholas Lezard writes glowingly of John Drury’s new biography of George Herbert, Music at Midnight, the Life and Poetry of George Herbert. This is a book I’m sure we’ll have in the collection soon, and it is a nice opportunity to pause over George Herbert, who is, for many readers, a life-long reading excursion:

Some of the more recent book length critical commentaries on Herbert in ODY include Heart-work : George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic by Cristina Malcolmson, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery by  Helen Vendler, and The Pulse of Praise: Form as a Second Self in the Poetry of George Herbert by Julia Carolyn Guernsey.

 

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

Jim Harrison

April 14th, 2014 · Comments Off on Jim Harrison

Full disclosure, Jim Harrison is one of this bloggers favorite authors.  Along with his many novels, he is the author of a number of poetry volumes, his voice and narrative touch very much “front and center” in his poems.  Among the titles we have here in ODY are:

All of these are published by the wonderful Copper Canyon press (they’re very attractive books) and the volume with Ted Kooser is an exchange in haiku. That book is a great example of haiku as an enduring (flourishing) form of American poetry…

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

Gerald Stern

April 9th, 2014 · Comments Off on Gerald Stern

This years recipient of the Poetry Society of America‘s Frost Medal is Gerald Stern.  We have a number of volumes by Mr. Stern, including:

We also have one book length critical study on Gerald Stern, Making the Light Come: The Poetry of Gerald Stern by Jane Somerville.

 

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

New Poetry

April 8th, 2014 · Comments Off on New Poetry

An annual April “National Poetry Month” post…a baker’s dozen of new collections of poems at the SLU Libraries:

May of these are found in the Browsing Collection on the shelves near our Paul and Anne Piskor Special Collections Reading Room…

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

Baseball Books

April 1st, 2014 · Comments Off on Baseball Books

Baseball season begins, a new season and all the new hope that goes with a new season. Of course, as pleasant as idling a summer afternoon away with a baseball game on the lawn or t.v., is reading about baseball! (…in the shade from a tree or cool corner of a porch…) Several summers ago blogging here we cataloged part of the collection of baseball books, which has grown since (not only was 2013 a good year for the Red Sox it was a good year for ODY buying baseball books). These new titles are given here as a “starting line-up”:

The last title is a Library of America edition edited by Ian Frazier–Lardner is the author of the short story “You Know Me Al,” and one of the great baseball writers of the early twentieth century.  If you don’t know Ring Lardner’s work there is an imperative read for at least one summer inning.

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

Doris Lessing

November 18th, 2013 · Comments Off on Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing died this weekend at age 94.  Vicki Barker at National Public Radio wrote this thoughtful and insightful tribute to Lessing’s life and work. We have forty titles by Lessing in the SLU Libraries’ collections, and this list represents a sampling of the literature about Lessing’s works that are here in ODY:

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

Lou Reed

October 28th, 2013 · Comments Off on Lou Reed

Lou Reed died over the weekend.  Reed certainly attained a culturally iconic status, such that his death makes one pause (and makes me think how he figures into the living breathing collection at ODY).  The Daily Beast has a nice “set list” of music and performances by Reed on the open web, and here is a juke box of titles by and about Reed in our collection:

 

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

Books We Pretend to Read

July 31st, 2013 · Comments Off on Books We Pretend to Read

…the folks at Book Riot have put together (with interesting graphics!) the list of the top twenty books people pretend the have read.  It’s based on a survey of 828 readers, and, full disclosure, number 9 is one that at least someone here has claimed to have read when it’s more likely it was more a matter of borrowing it from the public library in Manchester New Hampshire and carrying it around.  Life includes episodes of pretending out aspects of our relationships with other people, life with books would, by virtue of being life itself, include episodes of pretending out relationships with stories we haven’t actually read.  It only follows…

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

National Poetry Month, Bombings at the Boston Marathon

April 16th, 2013 · Comments Off on National Poetry Month, Bombings at the Boston Marathon

…seems like a poem appropriate for this sober morning is A.E. Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young.” From Bartleby.com,

Louis Untermeyer, ed. (1885–1977). Modern British Poetry.  1920.
A. E. Housman. 1859–
32. To An Athlete Dying Young
THE time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come, 5
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay, 10
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers 15
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man. 20
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head 25
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Tags: Recommended Book

St. Lawrence University