Product Description
Howard the Hippo now appears on tape for the first time with his family and friends, in "Hooray for Howard!" and "Howard Helps Out". With specially composed music, each character has his or her own "theme". ... Read more

Product Description
“Peter Davison, for years, has pondered with clear insight the perspectives of affection, attachment, loss, and memory, his language spare and his tone classical and deceptively quiet. The poems of this new collection look at the same world with surprise and speak of it with a startled and startling freedom, feeling ‘entitled to the liberty of breathing easy’—a freedom that brings with it the old clarity and eloquence.”
—W. S. Merwin

The poems in Peter Davison’s exuberant new collection contemplate the paradox of growing old—of having a mind still “a juicy swamp of invention” in a body beginning to falter.

Both intimate and generous, these poems celebrate the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth: snapping turtles lay their eggs and new ones hatch;a ruffed grouse drums his spring mating dance. Memory is central: a mother’s lost face; a father’s voice that “plumbed the marrow of poetry as tenderly / as if a darling had crept into his arms”; a wife’s “rueful eyes, cornflower blue.” And the poet pays tribute to the literary life—to reading, to the precise moment a word rises to consciousness, to getting over Robert Frost, to the mind of Sylvia Plath.
These are poems that expand time for us and deepen place, whether Davison is taking us on a path along a limestone cliff under canopies of holly and ivy, or is revisiting the instant while recovering from surgery when it becomes clear he is going to heal.“To learn poetry,” Davison writes in his foreword, “we need to take poems into our breath and blood, and that requires us to hear them as we read them, to learn to read with all the senses, especially with the ear.” Breathing Room gives us a splendid array of poems that we want to read with all our senses. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A positive review
The reviewer from Library Journal makes me laugh because she so misread the poem "You".I agree with the previous reader/reviewer, it is very specific, it is clearly addressed to the poet's mother, and it makes me cry too.One of the things that made me decide to change fields after getting my degree in lit was the overwhelming pretension and condescension of professionals, who seem to have forgotten that poetry isn't, or shouldn't be, only for an academic elite who make a career of exegesis.

But, I like lots of them
The pros who reviewed this book have a different agenda than casual readers, I think.(Or is it that there are so few casual readers of poetry?I note that there are very few customer reviews of books of poems...) It seems to me that most readers enjoy having their emotions stimulated by use of poetic language and form, and are less interested in edginess, or newness, or technical fireworks.On that basis, I recommend reading the poem You, referred to by one reviewer as a trite generalization directed at a distant you.Doesn't feel trite or generalized to me--in fact, as it transports me into the experience of someone yearning for his dead mother (pretty specific, huh?) it makes me cry.I don't feel manipulated, just moved.I'm not lost in admiration of Davison's technical achievement, just moved.But I think that's what a poem should do. ... Read more

Product Description
In the first part of this study six critical approaches to Othello are outlined: genre; historical and social; dramatic convention and decorum; character and psychological; the play as dramatic poem and archetypal criticism. The second part of the study offers the author's own, contextual approach. He takes into account the historical and social context in which the play was written, the context of the play in performance and the context in which contemporary audiences see and read "Othello". ... Read more

Product Description
The first section of this music theory essay collection tackles themes of Modernism and stylistic development. The second focuses on music as a social and spiritual happening. The book concludes with several essays about regional traditions and the concept of innovation. ... Read more