Customer Reviews (10)

One of a kind for northern USA
This is an excellent book with clear photos of different parts of trees in its stated regional area.Maps are very good also and easy to see. I know what I am talking about since I have all the field guides available thru Peterson, Audubon,etc for North American coverage. Coverage of species native and introduced is thorough. This makes identifying them easier by narrowing your choices .Too big for field work,but good notes taken in the field with your significant other helping you with smaller regional guides and camera phones in tow will suffice when you get back to your home or motel.You can sip a glass of red wine together and share the day's fun in the Natural world!

Another great book
This book is just about as complete as everyone else that has reviewed says.I really only wanted North American trees and that is precicely what I got.A very fine book that is well organized with abundant photos, drawings and discriptions.I am just a novice so the more complete of a book the better.The only thing I wish is that I had an old beat up one to take into the woods.

The one I reach for
There is no one book that will satisfy all your tree needs, but this one comes closest. Though it is Canada-centric, it should be useful no matter where in the US you may live. The pictures and line drawings are excellent, but most importantly they are consistent throughout. The "Quick Recognition" bits are a wonderful feature.
It is organized as an identification book but I use it more as an encyclopedia and wish it was organized alphabetically by genus. This is a book you read, then go for a walk, then read again. Highly recommended to everyone.

The best tree book
Every attempt I've made to identify a tree with this book has been successful. Worth every penny.

Great Field Guide
This is a great book to help with the identification of tree specimens that you find in our northern forests.Beautifully illustrated, with pictures of leaves (and fall color), flowers, fruits, and the bark of both mature and young trees, Farrar really provides horticultural enthusiasts with all the tools they need to make correct identifications (in most cases, of course).In addition to the pictures, other botanical information is provided such as max heights, growth rates, silhouettes, reproductive information, ranges, etc.

My only small complaint with the text is that the ranges for several species are incomplete, covering only the areas in Canada and the very northernmost United States.Many species have a much broader native habitat, and it's often necessary to reference a second text for that information.Other than that; however, it is a great text that even includes "quick recognition" tips for most species.Farrar gives us a valuable resource for horticulture lovers and woodsmen of the north. ... Read more

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Corporate Governance in Australia and New Zealand 2e is a fully updated, comprehensive study of the law and practice of corporate governance in an international setting but with particular reference to Australia and New Zealand. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (6)

Poet of loss, at last gaining recognition
Underrated for so long as a result of the same English academic snobishness that leads intelligent people to deny that a homely man of Stratford-upon-avon could have written Hamlet, its good to see that John Clare is finally being recognised as the great poet that he was. Its often said that he was a consistantly good poet, without composing any real classic. Yet read the title poem 'I Am' a few times, learn of its context in the final admission of Clare into a lunatic asylum, and I defy you to remain unmoved by lines such as
'I long for scenes, where man has never trod,
A place where women never smiled or wept'.

AN ENTREATY
As I love you all, I entreat you (yes, ENTREAT you) to read the poetry of John Clare. Being a woman of very inefficient words, I have found a bowl of cherries, a box of chocolates of things to say to express how I feel (you see what I mean?)

If you in love (as I am), please do not neglect to read this book. It will tell you how you feel, and then you can tell them, rather more eloquently than any of us mere mortals generally can.

I am a poet myself. I have been published in an anthology. I'm pretty good. This guy is awesome. His simplicity and innocence and utter goodness (All things which I, very unfashionably, greatly admire) astound me. He fills my heart with joy. That's what good writing is supposed to do, isn't it? Forget prozac, take Clare.

Great Stuff, Questionable Selection
The only thing more remarkable than John Clare's talent is that it has taken so long for it to receive the wider audience it deserves. Time and again in Jonathan Bate's appreciable but over-long biography we learn of great poems left to petrify in the dust of museums until "well into the twentieth century." That neglect alone qualifies as a disturbing testament to the cruelty with which some of literature's greatest geniuses flounder and fade under the rubble of history. Though Bate's recent biography is commendable in its success at introducing readers not just to Clare's complicated character, but also to the poet's technical, formal and linguistic ingenuity; he consistently describes poems in the biography that he chose not to include in this "Selected Poems." Most tragic is his decision not to include so many of the poems left out of the original published version of "The Rurual Muse." Moreover, to consider Bate's tantalizing description of some of the poems included in "The Rural Muse" along with his decision to leave them out of this Selected Poems is to encounter the strange misguidedness with which Clare's genius has been treated over the centuries. Writing of "Mary," the childhood love of Clare's life that haunted him into his grave, Bate says that "She is the subject of `The Milking Hour' which "recalls a final evening conversation with her, walking in a wheat field; and in `Nutting'" in which "Clare compares her auburn hair to the colour of ripe hazels, they shell nuts together, she flirtatiously throws the shells at him and then blushes when he pockets the husks as a keepsake." Yet neither poem can be found in this book. Even if page-count was the issue in putting this book together (one that contributed to the unfortunate underrepresentation of Clare's work in his lifetime), I seriously doubt that a lousy two more poems -- the very poems about which Bate speaks so seductively in his biography -- would have been problematic. Such tender images as Bate offers with regard to these poems must have made for some riveting verse from Clare, especially considering the enormous power of "First Love's Recollection," another poem about Mary from "The Rural Muse" Bate deigned to include here, or another of Clare's great "Mary" poems, "Love and Memory":

Thou art gone the dark journey
That leaves no returning;
`Tis fruitless to mourn thee
But who can help mourning
To think of the life
That did laugh on thy brow
In the beautiful past
Left so desolate now?

This is just the first stanza of a poem whose unusual lyrical intensity is sustained throughout. Why Bate couldn't have tossed in just a few more such poems - particularly the ones he talks about in his biography - is as baffling as it is enraging. After so much neglect and misfortune, one would think that Bate might have been a bit more discerning in his choice of poems to include here. It is time for Clare's reputation to be granted its very just reward, and I am afraid that Bate may have missed his chance. (Though I see that he has chosen to participate in the debate himself here, which exemplifies the deep love that must have motivated him to spend so much time and energy on the biography. His point about ratings and discussion is an excellent one.)

Nonetheless, readers will undoubtedly be thankful for some of the unbelievable writing Bate did select for this collection, such as the riveting "The Fallen Elm" in which we find ghostly anticipations of Auden, Philip Levine and Seamus Heany. Speaking of the elm whose falling prompted one of the most moving letters to a friend Clare ever penned, Clare writes:

Thou owned a language by which hearts are stirred
Deeper than by a feeling clothed in words,
And speakest now what's known of every tongue,
Language of pity and the force of wrong.

What amazing writing. That last line smacks of Auden's best work, particularly his masterful "September 1, 1939." The broad strokes of Clare's longer work are matched in power only by his more compact and formally unprecedented sonnets. In the biography, Bates writes that "Clare challenged the conventions of poetic diction by using the vocabulary of his region; in his poems of the 1830s he challenged the conventions of form, revealing that the sonnet could be divided up in new ways."Bates goes on to note that some of the rhyme schemes Clare employed in his sonnets are without precedent, while the timing of his execution simultaneously challenges and revitalizes an overly familiar poetic form. But beyond all of this jargon and technical criticism, the sheer emotional boundlessness of so many of Clare's sonnets is what really strikes home. Bates suggests that Clare is England's greatest poet of childhood. While I think such a statement undermines Blake's achievement, it is not unfair to consider Clare a very close second to Blake. Poems like Blake's "London" or "The Sick Rose" meet their match in some of Clare's more impassioned stretches of verse.

That the world has gone without fully recognizing one of its quieter geniuses is a sad fact of history now. At least someone is trying. Though Bate counts Clare's complete poems to the amount of "3500," it does not seem unreasonable to ask for a more comprehensive representation of the man's achievement. After all, Thomas Hardy's complete poems is over 900 pages long, and while the power of Hardy's work waned with age, Clare wrote some great material while languishing away in asylums as an older man.Even Hardy's amazing earlier poems -- "The Darkling Thrush" or "Neutral Tones," for instance -- fail to entirely outdo a good portion of Clare's work. The two poets are quite comparable, especially since Clare tackled precisely the same themes -- nature, mortality, lost loves, nostalgia -- and sometimes with just as much if not more majesty. I really applaud Bate's great effort on behalf of Clare, and though asking for more in the face of such hard work does little justice to my sincere gratitude, I still think some attention need be paid to the scattered nature of Clare's published writings. I think a fuller example of his work ought to be included in one book, not thrown across many different volumes. If Bate is not the man for this job, hopefully somebody else will be in my lifetime.

Correction of other review
The reviewer who states that Clare did not want his poems punctuated is in profound error, as I demonstrate at length in my biography of Clare. He did. 'Unpunctuated' Clare is a 20th century editorial construct that perpetuates the myth of the 'peasant poet'.

(Apologies for filling in a rating box, but the system wouldn't let me leave it blank: how typical of our culture where everything has to be ranked rather than discussed!)

Don't buy this book
John Clare is a fantastic poet, but this is a corrupt edition of his poems. The editor, one Jonathan Bate, has gone through and punctuated Clare's poems, despite Clare's explicit wishes that his poems be left as he wrote them (virtually without punctuation). If editors were still "tidying up" Emily Dickinson's equally idiodyncratic punctuation, we'd have their heads, but somehow this editor has gotten away with bowdlerizing Clare. If you want a bigger slection with more accurate texts, check out The Oxford Authors: John Clare, David Powell and Eric Robinson, eds., ISBN 0192813951. ... Read more

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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program. ... Read more

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This digital document, covering the life and work of John C(hipman) Farrar, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thomson Gale. The length of the entry is 929 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

Book Description

The letters of John Keats are, T. S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time, affords readers the pleasure of the poet's "trifles" as well as the surprise of his most famous ideas emerging unpredictably.

Unlike other editions, this selection includes letters to Keats and among his friends, lending greater perspective to an epistolary portrait of the poet. It also offers a revealing look at his "posthumous existence," the period of Keats's illness in Italy, painstakingly recorded in a series of moving letters by Keats's deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. Other letters by Dr. James Clark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Richard Woodhouse--omitted from other selections of Keats's letters--offer valuable additional testimony concerning Keats the man.

Edited for greater readability, with annotations reduced and punctuation and spelling judiciously modernized, this selection recreates the spontaneity with which these letters were originally written.

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Includes works by Dos Passos, Conkling, Teasdale and HD, among others.Download Description
Includes works by Dos Passos, Conkling, Teasdale and HD, among others. ... Read more