Odyssey Online

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:

• Visiting Walt: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Walt Whitman edited by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro
• Work Life: New Poems by Paul Kane
• Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost  edited by Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro
• Domestic Work: Poems by Natasha Trethewey, selected and introduced by Rita Dove
• What Work Is: Poems by Philip Levine
• Visiting Emily: Poems Inspired by the Life & Work of Emily Dickinson edited by Sheila Coghill & Thom Tammaro
• Field work: Poems by Seamus Heaney
• Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks
• Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed by George Monteiro
• Changing is Not Vanishing: A Collection of early American Indian Poetry to 1930 edited by Robert Dale Parker
• Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry by John Marsh
• The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling edited by Howard J. Booth

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:

• The English Poems of George Herbert edited by C. A. Patrides
• George Herbert selected by W. H. Auden
• Select Hymns Taken out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple, 1697 edited by William E. Stephenson
• The Works of George Herbert edited with a commentary by F.E. Hutchinson

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.

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:

• Songs of Unreason
• In Search of Small Gods
• Saving Daylight 
• Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser

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…

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:

• In Beauty Bright 
• Save the Last Dance: Poems
• Odd Mercy: Poems 
• Lovesick: Poems
• American Sonnets: Poems

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

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

• The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 selected by Glyn Maxwell
• Lines of Defense: Poems by Stephen Dunn
• Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Spiritual & Erotic Longing edited by Andrew Schelling
• Special Powers and Abilities: Poems by Raymond McDaniel
• Black Crow Dress by Roxane Beth Johnson
• It Becomes You: Poems by Dobby Gibson
• Incarnadine: Poems by Mary Szybist
• The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground edited by Glenn O’Brien
• Celtic light: Poems 1885-2010 by Lee Perron
• Countee Cullen: Collected Poems edited by Major Jackson
• The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems) by Alice Walker
• Collected Poems, May Swenson edited by Langdon Hammer
• The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics by Paul Muldoon

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

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 Stars are Back: the St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox, and Player Unrest in 1946 by Jerome M. Mileur
• Nikkei Baseball : Japanese American Players from Immigration and Internment to the Major Leagues by Samuel O. Regalado
• Mr. Wrigley’s ball club : Chicago & the Cubs During the Jazz Age by Roberts Ehrgott
• Long Shot by Mike Piazza
• Becoming Big League: Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics by William H. Mullins
• Smoky Joe Wood: the Biography of a Baseball Legend by Gerald C. Wood
• A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City by Jonathan Schuppe
• American Pastimes: the Very Best of Red Smith edited and with an introduction by Daniel Okrent
• Stories & Other Writings by Ring Lardner

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.

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:

• Doris Lessing : A Biography by Carole Klein
• Doris Lessing Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom
• Doris Lessing by Lorna Sage
• Doris Lessing : Critical Studies Edited by Annis Pratt and L. S. Dembo
• Doris Lessing : the Alchemy of Survival Edited by Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose
• Doris Lessing : the Poetics of Change by Gayle Greene
• Understanding Doris Lessing by Jean Pickering
• Between East and West : Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing by Müge Galin

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:

• The Raven lyrics and text by Lou Reed with photographs by Julian Schnabel
• All Yesterdays’ Parties : the Velvet Underground in Print 1966-1971 edited by Clinton Heylin
• Mainlines, Blood feasts, and Bad Taste : a Lester Bangs Reader edited by John Morthland
• The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry edited by Alan Kaufman
• Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 by Greil Marcus
• Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll by Mikal Gilmore

…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…

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