Product Description
This digital document is an article from Poetry, published by Modern Poetry Association on September 1, 1999. The length of the article is 1489 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: OUIJA.(Poem)
Author: J.D. McCLATCHY
Publication: Poetry (Refereed)
Date: September 1, 1999
Publisher: Modern Poetry Association
Volume: 174Issue: 6Page: 311

Article Type: Poem

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Chip Kidd, J. D. Mcclatchy, Thomas Stanton, Gilbert Collins, Samuel Prentiss, William Chesebrough. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 27. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Chip Kidd (born September 12, 1964) is an American author, editor, and graphic designer, best known for his innovative book covers. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Kidd grew up in the Reading suburb of Shillington, strongly influenced by American popular culture. While a design student at Penn State, an art instructor once gave the assignment to design a book cover for Museums and Women by John Updike, who is also a Shillington native. The teacher panned Kidd's work in front of the class, suggesting that book design would not be a good career choice for him. Kidd later received professional assignments to design covers for Memories of the Ford Administration and other books by Updike. Kidd is currently associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He first joined the Knopf design team in 1986, when he was hired as a junior assistant. Turning out jacket designs at an average of 75 a year, Kidd has freelanced for Doubleday, Farrar Straus ... Read more

Product Description
For the poet, even the most minute details of the natural world are starting points for flights of the imagination, and the pages of this collection celebrating the four seasons are brimming with an extraordinary range of observation and imagery. 

Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson, and Thoreau, from Keats, Blake, and Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Amy Clampitt, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost’s tribute to the evanescence of spring in “Nothing Gold Can Stay” to Langston Hughes’s moody “Summer Night” in Harlem, from the “stopped woods” in Marie Ponsot’s “End of October” to the chilling “mind of winter” in Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” the poems in this volume engage vividly with the seasons and, through them, with the ways in which we understand and engage the world outside ourselves. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"The Four Seasons", a review.
"The Four Seasons" is one of twenty "Everyman Library Pocket Poets" in my collection.

This volume has some serious and regrettable flaws which can be found in Cumming's iconic "In Just-". Line six has been omitted as has "running", and "far" appears as "fat" in subsequent lines.

I contacted the editor of the volume and he was to write the publisher, but the books in this series are printed in Germany.

If one can ignore the errors in Cummings he will find a comprehensive and rewarding selection of poems.

D. Sermersheim

The Four Seasons: Poems
This is a well thought out collection of poems and is a wonderful way to enjoy the changing seasons.I couldn't be happier with this purchase. ... Read more

Product Description
This groundbreaking volume may well be the poetry anthology for the global village. As selected by J.D. McClatchy, this collection includes masterpieces from four continents and more than two dozen languages in translations by such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. Among the countries and writers represented are:

• Bangladesh--Taslima Nasrin
  
• Chile--Pablo Neruda
  
• China--Bei Dao, Shu Ting
  
• El Salvador--Claribel Alegria
  
• France--Yves Bonnefoy
  
• Greece--Odysseus Elytis, Yannis Ritsos
  
• India--A.K. Ramanujan
  
• Israel--Yehuda Amichai
  
• Japan--Shuntaro Tanikawa
  
• Mexico--Octavio Paz
  
• Nicaragua--Ernesto Cardenal
  
• Nigeria--Wole Soyinka
  
• Norway--Tomas Transtromer
  
• Palestine--Mahmoud Darwish
  
• Poland--Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz
  
• Russia--Joseph Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko
  
• Senegal--Leopold Sedar Senghor
  
• South Africa--Breyten Breytenbach
  
• St. Lucia, West Indies--Derek Walcott
  

Customer Reviews (3)

A Good Find
This poetry anthology is a great find. I discovered many talented world poets with this book. Good information about each poet.

Another gem
Given the daunting task of selecting from, literally, a world of poets, McClatchy succeeds admirably.Once again his editing has me running out to buy individual books by the poets in the anthology.

Now if he would do a book of "Contemporary English Language [But Non-American] Poetry" to offer closure....

An aspect of McClatchy's editing that I like is that the selection per poet is large enough to get a good introduction - the opposite is a fault of most anthologies - though this does cause worthy poets to excluded.

I would love for some publisher to publish this and Contemporary American Poetry in good hardbound versions.They are prized members of my library, but, sadly, are not durable.

Poetry Worth Reading from around the World
A solid selection of poems written by major poets from around the globe. Diverse cultures represented. The quality of the translations is very good, making the poems accessible to English-speaking readers. One recurrent problem: no explanatory notes are provided to help English-speakers, particularly younger readers and college students, grasp the historical, political, social, or cultural allusions in some poems. For example, the Viet Nam poet Nguyen's "Model Citizens of the Regime" takes on fuller meaning if the reader knows that the "jail" referred to in the poem is not a penal institution for criminals but actually a communist re-education camp to which Vietnamese children were sent to be indoctrinated in Marxist ideology. Having a bit of this geopolitical, social, or cultural context, readers can gain a fuller understanding of the poems. One small complaint: the anthology was published prior to the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska's receipt of the Nobel Prize, and therefore the head note for her selection does not make note of that honor.

Given the general lack of interest in poetry, especially poetry from other countries, we're nonetheless lucky to have this anthology. ... Read more

Product Description
Thornton Wilder was the rare writer whose achievements as a playwright were matched by equal abilities as a novelist. As companion to its volume of Wilder's collected plays, The Library of America's edition of his early novels and stories brings together five novels that highlight his wit, erudition, innovative formal structures, and philosophical wisdom. Drawing on the post-collegiate year he spent in Rome, Wilder fashioned in The Cabala a tale of youthful enchantment with the Eternal City in the form of a fictitious memoir of an American student and the enigmatic coterie of noble Romans who draw him into their midst. He followed this debut novel two years later with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which catapulted him to literary prominence and earned him the first of his three Pulitzer prizes. "The Bridge," Wilder later wrote, "asked the question whether the intention that lies behind love was sufficient to justify the desperation of living." Set in 18th-century Peru, the book is a kind of theological detective story concerning a friar's investigations into the lives of five individuals before they were killed in a bridge collapse. An elegantly told parable, with credible historical ambience and psychologically rounded characters, The Bridge of San Luis Rey is primarily a probing inquiry into the nature of destiny and divine intention: Why did God allow these particular people to die?

The Woman of Andros, based on the Andria of Roman writer Terence, is a meditation on the ancient world filtered through the sensibility of a meditative courtesan; Heaven's My Destination, a departure from Wilder's historical themes, is a picaresque romp through Depression-era America; and The Ides of March takes up the story of Julius Caesar's assassination by imagining the exchange of letters among such prominent ancient figures as Catullus, Cleopatra, Cicero, and Caesar himself, "groping in the open seas of his unlimited power for the first principles which should guide him." The volume concludes with a selection of early short stories-among them "Précautions Inutiles," published here for the first time-and a selection of essays that offers Wilder's insights into the works of Stein and Joyce, as well as a lecture on letter writers that bears on both The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Ides of March. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Some great stuff, some not quite
He was such a fine writer. Our Town, which is not in this book, was one of those plays we had to read in high school and resonates to this day. But I had never read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, so I bought this book to read that and to sample some of his other novels.
I took my time reading every word (sometimes reading sections more than once) and tried to absorb all of his detailed descriptions, which really add to the richness of the experience. I thought the Bridge of San Luis Rey was wonderful.I liked all of the other stories, although some more than others. I learned something from each novel - either about his time and place or the times and places he created. It was all worth the effort.
One observation: The font is very small and the line spacing practically non-existent, so you might need an index card or something like that to make the reading easier.

Excellent compendium
The Library of America is a "can't lose" situation for purchasers and this volume is no exception.The book includes an excellent selection, is intelligently edited, includes a good summary of Wilder's life, is bound and printed well, and is a financial bargain.

Great texts, but needs better notes from editor
I don't know why, but I have often found myself drawn to the works of Wilder, and I was sol glad to see this collection of Wilder's early writings.There is no denying the power of :The Bridge of San Luis Rey."I have no qualms with the texts themselves, but the editorial aspect bothers me.Wilder's sexuality is completely left out, and this is important when you consider that the third act of "Our Town" (not in this text) was drafted at the home of his lover, Samuel Steward.Steward's pen name, Phil Andros, is also shared by Wilder's novel "The Woman of Andros."Coincidence?I think not.Again, I love the Library of America (I have just about every volume), and I love the novels in this collection, but the editor, J.D. McClatchy could have been a little more honest in his notes. ... Read more

Product Description
From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter–a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry.

The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An Absolute Joy
I don't think anyone needs to be gay or lesbian to love this book. There are so many wonderful poems and poets, and such a range of emotions, all of them conveying what J.D. McClatchy in his beautiful preface calls the "anxiety sewn into the lining of euphoria." Anxious for good reason, of course: such love was compelled to not to "speak its name" for fear of arrest, conviction, imprisonment and disgrace. The poems are helpfully arranged according to the journey of love (as is true of the recent anthology, Sonnets for Sinners: Everything One Needs to Know About Illicit Love), my most favorite recent acquisition. If you like either of these books you'll want both. My favorite among gay/lesbian poems is Richard Barnfield's "Glove"--such a beautiful sonnet, and to my surprise not very well known. It's worth buying this book just to get that poem. (My favorite in the Sonnets for Sinners book, is Princess Diana's "Hearts", a delight that John Wareham says he "tinkered" together from one of Diana's interviews.) The other book in same league, to my mind anyway, is the Everyman anthology, Erotic Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets). But start with Love That Speaks Its Name-- it really is something very special

Loved it, Loved It, LOVED IT!!
This was the best money I've spent on a book this year, maybe ever, and although I'm not much of a poetry book-buyer, I read my share of books.(I've reviewed gay- and lesbian-themed books free-lance for over 15 years.)"Love Speaks Its Name" is simply an excellent anthology of gay- and lesbian-themed poetry with artists as diverse as Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, Cavafy, Cole Porter, and several Baby Boomers sounding off on AIDS as well as traditional themes of love.

Why do I like this little volume so much?For one thing, it's part of the well-regarded "Everyman" library, which is to Knopf what Modern Library is to Random House.This means you can purchase identically-sized volumes of literature, even erotic poetry, from the same line.The publishers of "Love Speaks Its Name" took a fairly traditional, quality-oriented approach to content (including recent poets, as I said); but although the binding is a conservative navy blue the bound-in bookmarker ribbon is lavender (cute, no?).

Most of the anthologies of gay or lesbian poetry I've reviewed over the past 15 years fall into one of two categories (1) the professor had some favors to pay off, so excellence took a back seat to other factors (though in many cases you might not know this from the impenetrable deconstructionist jargon that constitutes the introduction); or, (2) the regional "Let's assemble a book!All comers welcome!"Well meant, but not always successful.With its erudition, user-friendly language and delineation of Love into themes like "Longing" and "Ecstasy," "Love Speaks Its Name" is a class act all the way.

For a ridiculously small amount of money you can immerse yourself in this book and find out just why Cavafy is so highly regarded, even in translation, why Auden is still audacious today, why Amy Levy's young death was such a loss to the world of poetry, and discover the NON-bowdlerized lyrics to "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" (there are so many versions floating around it's hard to find the real deal).

What more can I say?Buy it.If you hate it, you won't have wasted much money and you can mail it as a Christmas gift ... ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of J(oseph) D(onald) McClatchy, (Jr.), is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 3051 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
A remarkable new series of audiobooks, featuring the most distinquished twentieth-century American poets reading from their own work. A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings on cassette and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliography, and a commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of The Yale Review.Amazon.com Review
Before committing suicide in 1963 at the age of 31, SylviaPlath wrote a bounty of work, including the final eight poems includedin this self-read collection--described by Robert Lowell as her"appalling and triumphant fulfillment." This later work, as well as 13additional recordings gathered here from Plath's short but significantcareer, are certainly triumphant: her prose is precise, scathing,utterly original, and mature beyond her years. Fortunately forlisteners, Plath's voice mirrors her writing. She delivers "LadyLazarus"--a piece about suicide, self-loathing, and her hatred formen--with a dagger-like cadence and clear, confident pitch. Shedescribes a suicide attempt:

It's easy enough to do it ina cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's thetheatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the sameface, the same brute

Customer Reviews (6)

Fascinating
A fascinating reading. I love the various nuances of her voice. It adds a new dimension to her poems, which are thrilling, interesting, and pleasant to the ear.

De profundis
There are poems here to warm your heart, and others to chill your blood.The 1957 poem "Sow" is a glorious celebration of the muddiness and bloodiness of thriving, procreating life, redolent of the optimistic romanticism of Wordsworth or Robert Graves.When we get to the later recordings, on side two, the poet's nerve ends are raw-exposed."Daddy", with its dark and terrible imagery - "Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face..." - makes you wonder exactly how her father, who died when she was a child, behaved toward her.That and "Lady Lazarus" are about as dark as poetry can get.Not every poet is the best reader of their work, but Plath conveys her agony in these recordings in a way that surely no one else could do.If you are prepared to probe the very centres of poetic pain, get this tape.

A Powerful Experience
This cassette is an amazing recording. Hearing Plath read her poems "Lady Lazarus" and "Ariel" is an experience beyond compare. Hearing the intonation of her voice leads one closer todiscovering another dimension to the poetry beyond that written on thepage. Her poems are works of art that are brought to a new plateau when sheinfuses her voice. They begin to stand in a new space, replicating themotion that her poem "Ariel" describes.

Audio intensifies relationship between poet and listener
This tape is amazing.From the moment I first read Plath's poetry, I longed to hear her read it herself.Her poetry is so extremely personal.The sound of her voice makes the poetry all the more powerful.This tape also allows the listener to hear the beauty of the words and the rhythm ofPlath's works.

Voice from the Dead
Listening to these recordings is a haunting experience. Plath recorded Side A when she was 25 and in the full blush of newlywed happiness. Like the rigidly structured poems of "The Colossus," Plath's deliveryof these earlier poems reflects a painstaking adherence to precision ofpronunciation and form. However, turn to Side B, recorded five years lateron October 30th, 1962--three days after her 30th birthday, three monthsbefore her suicide--and you are at once stunned by the harrowingtransformation in both Plath's voice and poetry. These are the"Ariel" poems, the poems that Plath herself declared to be"the best poems of my life; they will make my name." Here, it isclear that all hope and vitality has been sapped, and all that is left arethe charred remains of her former self--bruised and beaten, suffocating ina self-made grave of self-loathing and regret. Listen closely, and you canhear the faint murmuring of traffic outdoors, or the gentle shuffling ofpapers and creaking of wooden drawers. You are lost in her world, locked inher slow destruction. Sylvia Plath's pain bleeds from these recordings, andyou will not walk away from them unstained. ... Read more