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Customer Reviews (8)

Quite delightful
This physically handsome book has an excellent concept: a selection of poems that are not just wonderful to read, but also ideal for memorization. While some of the memorization is too difficult -- like other reviewers, I think Frost offers better candidates for memorization than "Mending Wall" -- other poems are well suited to committing to memory, like cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town;" Hopkins' "Spring and Fall;" and, yes, Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat." The act of memorization gives ownership to the poem unlike other reading experiences, and provides sustenance long after the book is read.

Beautiful collection
Physically this is a lovely book. It sits well on a kitchen countertop and invites memorization as you wash the dishes and prepare food. The poems are indeed fun to memorize. My only wish is that it included poems from a more diverse pool.

Why would you want to memorize *these* poems?
Many of these poems are just simply not lyrical, rhythmical, nor visual.Memorizing many of these poems will be like eating sawdust.

When we think of great poems to memorize, (there are great poems, and a subset that are worth memorizing.)We think of poems like Blake's "The Tyger".Who can forget the beautifully put together poem of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"? What about Thomas' "Do not go Gentle into that Good Night"?

To be sure, these poems have been included in this book, but where is John Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"?Frost' "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"?

When I think of poems I would like to memorize, I search for those poems that have something to say about human condition. That is mostly a given for great poetry.But to memorize them, I look for poems that are musical -both lyrical and rhythmical, and having good imagery.

So to my excitement, I thought this book would be a good collection of such poems.I was sadly disappointed.There maybe 10 poems in here that are worth committing to memory.The others are just great to read.

To add to more of my frustration, there is no author index at the end of the book.

If you want a much better collection of poems, with a much higher percentage worth remembering, I strongly suggest Laurence Perrine's Sound and Sense.

A Worthy Excercise With A Better Selection Of Poetry!
Although I never considered memorizing anything to be fun or profitable in lower school, the idea of memorizing wonderful poetry appeals today. Intrigued by the title, I picked up a copy of "Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize." Although the idea is a worthy one, the poetry selection disappoints. I am sure that poet, and editor, John Hollander put considerable thought into which poems to include in this book. I just do not care for many of his choices.

I did find various old, (and dear), favorites that shine, and inspire, in an anthology such as this: William Butler Yeats "The Song of the Wandering Angus," E.A. Robinson's "Richard Cory," Percy Bysshe Shelly's "Ozymandias," Richard Lovelace's "To Althea, From Prison," Stevie Smith's "Not Waving But Drowning," Oliver Wendell Holmes "The Chambered Nautilus," and Elizabeth Bishop's extraordinary "Sonnet."

I would never think of committing to memory many of the editor's other selections. They're either too long, too difficult to memorize, or just plain not to my taste. With all of Emily Dickinson's magnificent poetry, why "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass?" And why Robert Frost's "A Mending Wall," which is a wonderful poem, but not the best for memorization purposes? Why "The Owl and the Pussycat" or "The Song of the Mad Prince?" There are, of course, selections from Shakespeare, and even The Old Testament, included. In general, there are too many better poetry anthologies around, to give more than a glance to this one - a disappointing 3 Stars.

"I am in need of music that would flow-"
I love the idea of memorizing one hundred great poems; to carry around in your head always, ready for any situation.

Unfortunately, "Committed to Memory" is not a big help with such a project. The subtitle, "100 Best Poems to Memorize" is misleading, because for every good choice (like Byron's "So We'll Go No More A' Roving") there are at least two no-so-great ones ("Lord Randall" and "The Owl and the Pussycat") and a few selections are downright inexplicable (Why would anyone want to memorize "The Song of the Mad Prince"?). An ideal poem for memorization should combine deep meaning with a strong rhyme, making it easier to burn into your mind. "A Mending Wall", by Robert Frost, while a great poem, in my mind is just too hard to memorize. "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" would have been a better Frost choice. Tennyson's "Ulysses" is just way too long, and other selections suffer from plain old mediocrity. The only truly excellent choice here in my view is actually the first one, Elizabeth Bishop's "Sonnet". It's down hill from there.

In conclusion, if you really want to memorize one hundred wonderful poems I recommend just checking out "Committed to Memory" from the library, gleaning what you can, and then buying "Poems to Read", by the Favorite Poem Project; a terrific anthology that has at least fifty poems well worth committing to memory. As for "Committed to Memory"; it's strictly rental quality.

GRADE: C ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not his best work.
John Hollander, The Night Mirror (Atheneum, 1971)

John Hollander's work is often inconsistent (e.g., his debut, A Crackling of Thorns, selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets but rightly called to task by its selector, W. H. Auden, for a few things). His work is also, often, exceptionally difficult (Town and Country Matters may be the best example of this, poetically at least). But not until reading The Night Mirror did I encounter a John Hollander book that is both.

I have no idea what, exactly, about The Night Mirror makes it so much more difficult than, say, Harp Lake, or the fantastic The Head of the Bed; I've been mulling over the question of what makes for "difficult" writing for a number of years now, trying to figure out why, say, Gunter Grass' Dog Years is so much harder to read than Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, despite both being (in a sense) war novels, or why Bataille's The Tears of Eros is such easier going compared to his Visions of Excess. I think it has something to do with word choice and sentence structure, but if I ever come up with a definitive answer, I'll let you know. For now, let's just say that The Night Mirror is, in places, some of the most difficult poetry I have come across in many a day (and I read a whole lot of poetry). This is not to say it's bad, of course. Difficult reading is often the most rewarding (cf. McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Walker's The Secret Service, or the aforementioned Dog Years). And in this particular collection, it's not always the difficult poems that ring hollow. In fact, the book's easiest reading, a piece of (intended, one assumes) doggerel called "A Poem of Pooballs," is so empty that if you strike it, it will likely shatter. Pooballs, indeed.

While there's nothing else here quite so silly, there's some material that requires slogging though, as opposed to the normal mode of reading Hollander, which falls somewhere between enchanted and impressed. And a number of the poems here do pull that off. The title poem is especially grand, and requires a number of readings just to get all the subtleties of the sound working in your head before you even start thinking about what it may mean. But unfortunately not everything in the book is of such grand scale. *** ... Read more

Product Description
An anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet praises the whale. Shakespeare sympathizes with the hunted hare. Marianne Moore tries to catch a jelly-fish. Virgil and Emily Dickinson contemplate Bees. Kipling lulls a baby seal to sleep. From East to West, from ancient times to modern, from Mei Yu Ch'en on swarming mosquitoes to William Cullen Bryant's solitary waterfowl and Rainer Maria Rilke's enchanted gazelle, from Auden on cats and dogs to E.E. Cummings's verse in the shape of a grasshopper to James Merrill's vision of the octopus, here--selected by John Hollander--are 136 poems that provide exhilarating access to literature's glorious lyric zoo. ... Read more

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John Hollander's "Blue Wine and Other Poems," his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career.

Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this volume--"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"--move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony.

Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good stuff.
John Hollander, Blue Wine and Other Poems (Johns Hopkins, 1979)

Blue Wine is a fun collection. Which is not something one normally thinks to say about a book by John Hollander (one that contains a poem dedicated to that antithesis of fun, John Ashbery, no less). The late seventies saw Hollander turning a bit more towards the absurd and a lot more toward the erotic (culminating in Town and Country Matters in the early eighties). This can be seen as kind of a workshop building up to Town and Country Matters, but it's a great workshop:

"We rode gently over evening fields
Together: we were our own one steed.
Faster and faster we went
Until no trees swept by: they became
Part of the color of ground and sky.
And when the great hedge loomed up
Then we took it in a long, slow leap.
Now in our dark, soundless boat
We lie on the wide water."
(--"Land and Water")

Very good stuff. Hollander fans will love it. Others might still struggle with it, but trust me, it's more accessible than some of his books. *** ½ ... Read more

Product Description
In this major new collection, John Hollander displays the elegance, versatility, and wit that mark him as perhaps the most urbane poet in America. "In Time and Place" features a generous offering of new verse, an extended prose piece, and a series of prose poems previously available only in a rare, privately published edition.

The tightly rhymed quatrains of the new poems demonstrate once again the freedom Hollander achieves through mastery of form. The consummate control with which he writes in memoriam to a lost love and a time of absence gives him opportunities to move through dimensions most poets never see. His purgatorial mock-journal--dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing--leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation. ... Read more

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In this deeply philosophical and highly inventive new collection, John Hollander, the distinguished author of numerous books of poetry, offers profound yet playful meditations on the reflective mind and on the words with which we come to know the world. In forms as varied as sonnets, songs, and ancient odes, he muses over the ways we use (and misuse) language as “we grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head / And keep it in a soft continuingness.”

Here, too, are striking verses about the passage of time as recorded by the movement of light and shadow across a surface, whether it be the face of a clock or the enclosed walls of a Hopper painting. Throughout, Hollander delights us with mirrors, palindromes, and strange and surprising reversals that keep the mind ever alert with the challenge “to make words be themselves, taking time out / From all the daily work of meaning, to / Make picture puzzles of what they’re about.”

Donna Seaman has written of John Hollander, “His wise and robustly complex poems span the mind like stone aqueducts or canyon-crossing railroad bridges—awesome works of knowledge and craft, art and devotion.” In this exciting new volume, Hollander shows once again the reach of his poetic imagination.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Various styles with different impacts
These poems are in various style, and for me some work well and others are perhaps too academic, or with too many literary allusions that I missed.
The poems that that work for me are direct with contrasting phrases, like the opening poem "By Heart":"The gossip of swallows, the faint radioed / Reed section of a dance band through an open Window down at the far end of the street". Or "From a Palace Diary"
"My grandfather the wise kind was told by an informed bird -- / A prophetic hoopie ... "The ones that don't work for me, Like Horace Ode II.14, seem intent on loading up with references ... :we have to watch meandering Cocytus and Danaus famous bunch of daughters". Perhaps the poem that works best at combining directness, slightly askew references, and some literary references was "Where it comes from" , with "Searching ever the sources of all the sources,"... and "Any one of our private springs / May be numbered among the most noble fountains / Like one sung of by Horace ... ".
... Read more

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New translations of classic French fables. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

English Audio Interpretation Stands by Itself
I really enjoyed the very original black & white graphics that accompanied each of the fables: the graphics alone are worth the price of this book including the English Audio CD of the translations. I played the CD by itself and I was mesmerized by the witty delivery that completely matches the original French satire. It would be a blast to see it done as a one-man stage show! Thanks for this excellent package!

Wonderful Stuff!
If you enjoy French literature in translation, you should already be familiar with the name of Norman Shapiro--one of our pre-eminent French-to-English translators.Quite simply, whatever Mr. Shapiro chooses to translate results in a highly enjoyable, entertaining addition to my French lit. bookshelf!If you find pleasure in Richard Wilbur's Moliere, Donald Frame's Montaigne and Rabelais, Richard Howard's Stendhal and Baudelaire, Burton Raffel's Chretien, or Merwin's Song of Roland--then you owe it to yourself to investigate Shapiro's La Fontaine translations--four volumes to date: "Fifty Fables" and "Fifty More Fables" published by Illinois, "La Fontaine's Bawdy" published by Princeton, and the present book, "Once Again, La Fontaine" published by Wesleyan.These books are--alas!--one of the best-kept secrets of High French Literature to Read for Pleasure.

Also, Shapiro has translated volumes of Verlaine and Baudelaire for the University of Chicago press (two very handsome paperback editions), and do be on the lookout for his edition of Ronsard/Marot/Bellay from Yale University Press!

The annotation left off the best part!
The publisher's annotation fails to mention *anywhere* that the CD included with the disc features 26 fables read by actor Douglas Sills, of Broadway's The Scarlet Pimpernel fame. He does a delightful job of interpreting various characters. ... Read more

Product Description
This book-length poem is structured as a series of messages transmitted by a master spy to the director of spy operations and a number of his fellow spies. The spy speaks of his own alienation and sense of purposelessness as a secret agent. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Another excellent Hollander title.
John Hollander, Reflections on Espionage: The Question of Cupcake (Atheneum, 1976)

You never really know what you're going to get from a John Hollander book of poetry. In this case, you get a title that says "satire," or puts you in mind of the Power Puff Girls or some like. But once you've flipped open the first page, what you find is anything but; Hollander takes you on a trip through the obsessive mind of a spy (code named, obviously, Cupcake), through nine moths of his reports both to superiors and colleagues. The effect is quite startling, and wonderful.

There are some technical problems with the poetry, mostly in the line breaks, which are inconsistent and often irrational; the notes section (read it, for it's actually a part of the work, rather than being a real notes section) mentions in passing that the whole thing is actually rhythmic blank verse. True most of the time, but breaks in various places, leading one to believe perhaps more care could have been taken with the line breaks overall without sacrificing any of the readability herein.

That is, however, something of a minor quibble in a work of this magnitude. Another definite winner from John Hollander, well worth seeking out. ****

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Kudos to Yale University Press for making this wonderful poem available again. Both an increasingly absorbing spy narrative and a roman a clef about modern poetry and poets, this poem is typical of Hollander's intellectual playfulness, not to mention his immense erudition. It stands out among his poems, however, both for its involvement of the reader within its games, and for its gesture toward "lower" literary genres. A new introduction gives the poet's reflections on the work's genesis, and notes are provided at the end for those who wish to cheat. ... Read more

Product Description
One of the most gifted of W. H. Auden's choices for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Hollander has pursued the wide range and metrical brilliance of Auden's own poetry, so that this new book exhibits both a large compass of subject matter (from philosophical matters to personal narrative) and, as usual, some astonishing meditations on paintings - here, by Charles Sheeler, Rene Magritte, and Edward Hopper. By turns witty, touching, profound, mocking, ingenious, and always clever, Hollander's poems are a joy for the reader. He is a modern master. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"Virtuoso at Play"
... John Hollander's poems are both games and masterpieces. In "Figurehead: And Other Poems" the poet rings playful changes on the stories of Sappho, Arachne, Minerva, his mom, and the Duchess of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," who tells us, in perfect Browning-style verses, that nobody murdered her. She's very much alive, thank you, and enjoying some peace and quiet in the convent to which she secretly escaped from the "mad fool" of a husband who doubtless, now, pontificates to bored listeners about the quality of her smile in the portrait he had commissioned. She faked that smile, you see, and she's freer behind her walls than the clod she married will ever be anywhere: "at which," she concludes, "I truly smile."

Hollander plays with the names of assorted ailments: "quinsy," "whiffles," "glanders," "pip," and "glottis" ("nature disposes," he quips, but "medical science proposes" the names for what nature deals out). In "Variations on a Table" he ponders a poet's writing table, Locke's tabula rasa, the multiplication tables, and a motion tabled at a meeting, then segués to Babel, sable coats, Mabel, and transatlantic cables before "turning the tables" back to the polished surface upon which a writer does his work--each seemingly free association contributing to a cogent essay on language. Hollander's juggling of paradoxes, puns, and demanding forms is more than a literary version of Olympics-level gymnastics. "Figurehead" is virtuoso poetry from a brilliant mind at work.

Figuratively and Literally Re-Readable
Masterful. Visionary. Textured. Resonating. Illuminating. Definitive. Passionate. Cognitive. Reachable. Multi-layered. Meaningful. Empowered. Suggestive. Pacesetting. Expansive.Conversational. Cogent. Persuasive. Rhythmic. Compressed. Creative. Challenging. Fruitful. Generous. Ingenious. Hearty. Mature. Stimulating. Timely. Wise. Inviting. Satisfying. ... Read more

Product Description
Veteran dog trainer Vicki Hearne provides a penetrating examination of the interactions between animals and the human world. "Brilliant, fiery. Hearne captures a hundred nuances of the relation between people and animals. Anyone who likes dogs . . . will like Bandit."--Chicago Sun-Times. Hearne also is the author of Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name and a contributing editor for Harper's. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

The ultimate pit bull defense that most pit bull people are too illiterate to read
Hearne's beautifully written book is, oddly, never referenced by people who loudly defend the 'fighting' breeds of dog from scrutiny.Hearne was a skilled and charismatic writer who can almost sell the utter malarkey that pit bulls have been unfairly maligned by 'the media' and 'hysteria.'But apparently, her complex, elliptical writing style and fascination with philosophy are a 'downer' for people who just want outrage stories about beaten dogs and biased media outlets.How very revealing.

Of dogs and men
This isn't a book about dog training, although it talks about that quite a bit. It's not even a book about dogs really, although it talks about dogs all the time. It's really about our relationships with dogs, how they fit into our lives and our society and our mythology. Hearne taught poetry at Yale, but her real calling seems to be dog training. Her writing is funny and dry and full of information, and sooner or later she'll say something that annoys you. But if you can't take a little annoyance you should have a dog. And she's probably only annoying you because you are carrying around some misconception about dogs.

Awesome book very true to the issue
I have owned and trained multiple breed of dogs and Ms Hearne is very right about the issue. This book should be mandatory to be read by anyone and everyone of the dumb politicians that come up with those stupid bans. This book is very true and is a must read, whether you are a dog owner (of any breed) or not.

The S&M Trainer
The late Vicky Hearne was never considered a great trainer across the board.Those that believe in Positive Reinforcement training consider her techniques and ideology to be cruel and unnecessary.For instance:holding a dogs head in a hole filled with water to stop the dog from digging.There are other methods that can stop the behavior without using such barbaric methods.Her techniques should not be used, and notice, the aggressive dogs she deals with are never rehabilitated into mainstream doggy life as it were.They are never trained to the point of being trusted.So much for her methods.

One of my favorite books
Some people object to Vicki Hearne's writing style (smart girls can be annoying). Others feel her training methods were too harsh. But Vicki Hearne knew a great dog, and how to write about one. Be warned: This book is politically incorrect and may make you do something really stupid, like adopt a pit bull. Vicki Hearne is, after all, the one who said, "It is true that Pit Bulls grab and hold on. But what they most often grab and refuse to let go of is your heart, not your arm." ... Read more

Product Description
Twenty two Yale Alumni wax poetic on favorite works.A good gift idea in an unsusual vertical format. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

More good stuff from Hollander.
John Hollander, Powers of Thirteen (Atheneum, 1983)

Powers of Thirteen is one of those ideas that sounds really rather amazing, when you think about it. This book is comprised of one hundred sixty-nine (which is, of course, 13x13) thirteen-line stanzas, with each line having thirteen syllables. Other than that, you really don't need to know anything other than that the book was written by John Hollander; if you're familiar with the man's work, you know what to expect already-- wordplay, a touch of erotic scurrilousness, diction that feels just the slightest bit archaic, but in such a way that you can still imagine someone (someone erudite, anyway) actually talking like this. As always, Hollander is a joy to read, if requiring a bit more thought and attention than the average penner of verses. *** ½ ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Minor correction
Witty, skillfully crafted, and great fun.Correction to the other review:"New York" is an imitation of Juvenal's third satire, in the tradition of Samuel Johnson's "London."

Erotic and satiric. (Well, what did you expect?)
John Hollander, Town and Country Matters: Erotica and Satirica (David R. Godine, 1972)

John Hollander, long one of the foremost modern metrical poets, also has a wicked (and rather juvenile) sense of humor. That can best be seen in Town and Country Matters, a book put out in a small (5,000) edition by Godine in 1972. It collects a number of pieces of Hollander's erotic work, including his celebrated translations of Catullus, and one long piece of satire called "New York" (originally published in Harper's back when Harper's published long poems). Attractively printed in an oversized hardback, with erotic illustrations by Hollander's wife Anne, Hollander's book is exactly the kind of thing you'd want on display on your coffee table when your more hip guests show up.

The stuff inside is pretty fine, too. For metrical poetry, it reads like free verse in many places. The best rhymed poem is the one you can't tell is rhymed until you're halfway through.(He manages to make this work even in the Catullus translations.)

The one slipping point is "New York," which seems almost as if it were an attempt at an epic a la Tennyson or Browning. And from that perspective, it succeeds rather well; Hollander uses the lyric scope of the rhymed poem in a narrative style, telling the story (complete with soliloquies) of two friends who bump into one another while one is moving back to New York after fifteen years in exile and the other is leaving the city for good. The problem with it (as with much of Tennyson) is that the specific scenes go on too long; rhymed poetry often seems to rob the writer of any sense of timing at all, something in which Hollander shows in the shorter pieces he he is quite gifted, normally.

All in all, though, a fun little piece of work. Deadly hard to find these days thanks to the scarceness of the printing, but much joy is to be found within its pages.*** ½ ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

a major American poet
This collection of Hollander's poetry is exquisitely crafted, as is the rule with his work. The poetry possesses a surface brilliance and a control of traditional poetic form that puts him in the company of only a few modern masters - to name some of them, Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur.

The title poem is the center piece of this collection. It is a set of 144 quatrains that utilize the stanza immortalized by Fitzgerald's rendering of _The Rubaiyat_. It is a major work, and not one that I suspect many other poets could pull off, or would want to try for that matter. Hollander manages it, and the results are impressive. The imagery is compelling, and the poetry is exceedlingly musical (as befits such a nod to _The Rubaiyat_). The emotions and moods evoked often recall Fitzgerald's famous rendering, too.

The Library Journal review panned this book because in the mind of the reviewer, Hollander isn't Emily Dickenson. Hollander's work possesses its own distinction, and comparisons of major poet against major poet are as absurd as they are tedious. Furthermore, the comparison in this case seems weirdly inappropriate, based on the different intentions of the poets.

Readers who like this book should check out Hollander's excellent _Selected Poems_. His book on the craft of verse, _Rhyme's Reason_, is intelligent and entertaining, and worth a look for those interested in the practice of traditional verse forms.

As for this book, it is highly recommended, if you can find a copy. It has been out of print for a number of years. ... Read more