Open your ears, hear the sound
A poem that’s what you hear
Tugging at the heart
Waking up your soul
Listen, listen it’s speaking to you
Oh how you make us sad
Oh how you make us happy
How complex yet simple
A poem to reach you and me

All right I know I am no Robert Frost, but I due have a genuine love of Poetry. Poetry speaks out, not only is it fun to read but it is fun to listen to. I think a love of poetry starts when we are young with the simple rhyming games that we all played. My 5-year-old son has already “written” poems for his Mom. As I stated poetry is great to listen to Poetry Out Loud is a book with that purpose in mind.

In the introduction by the editor of the book Robert Alden Rubin he says he is not an expert on literary critisim but he has a love of poetry and the sound of it. This book has over 100 poems in it with authors varying from Walt Whitman to Ezra Pound. I will not give a laundry list of all the poems in the book, but will attempt to give you an idea of how the book flows.

The book starts out with an introduction by James Earl Jones when I saw his name I was wishing I had a tape of the book with him reading the poems(What a voice that man has I'm Jealous). In the next section the editor explains his purpose in the book, which basically is to compile poetry to be read out loud to anybody who will listen. The book then is broken down into 7 sections with poems in each topic. The sections are as follows:

1. Poems of Love and Wreckage
2. Light Verse and Poems That Tell Stories
3. Poems of Animals and the Natural World
4. Poems of Contradiction and Opposition
5. Poems of Vision
6. Poems of Alienation
7. Art, Poetry, and the Making Thereof

For each section in the left or right margin of the page, the editor has notes on either the type of poetry or the poems themselves for that page. I found this helpful and his notes are written for a layperson so you won’t need a master’s degree in English to understand them. At the end of the book he has additional notes about some of the poems, and three different indexes. One for title of the poem, one for first lines of the poems, and last an index of authors of the poems.

Section by section

The first section Poems of Love and Wreckage are as the section title refers love poems or poems about lost love. A few of the poems in this section which I felt where the best are The Owl And The PussyCat by Edward Lear. To His Coy Mistress By Andrew Marvell, and The Sun Rising by John Donne. Now there are quite a few more poems I am limiting how many poems I mention to keep the review readable. This holds for all the sections all the poems are worth reading I am just mentioning my favorites.

The second section Light Verse and Poems That Tell Stories contains such classic poems as Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town by e.e. cummings (For those of you who are not familiar with this author he never capitalized the letters in his own name.), and Crossing The Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The third section Poems of Animals and the Natural World has some of my favorite poetry. I love nature and poems about this subject have always fascinated me. However, I promise to limit the poems listed to three. The Tyger by William Blake is wonderful. Also to by found in this section is Robert Frost’s The Oven-Bird . I think Robert Frost is one of the greatest poetry writers of all time so I would have to mention this poem. I would have to say the third favorite would be A Description Of A City Shower by Jonathan Swift who was an Anglican Church priest. His poem is a bit of a satire.

Onto the fourth section Poems of Contradictions and Opposition one of the poems in this section is by my all time favorite poet T.S. Eliot. Taken from The Burial of The Dead the editor gives us The Waste Land which I am going to post here for you all to enjoy:

” April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”
The translation for the German phrase is “I am not a Russian woman at all – I come from Lithuania, a true German” Other poems in this section are In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden, and My Heart Leaps Up by William Wordsworth.

The fifth section Poems of Vision has such poems as The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats, God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and The Maldive Shark by Herman Melville.

The sixth section Poems of Alienation offers such selections as Wendy Rose’s Leaving Port Authority For The St. Regis Rezz . Also in this section is After Death by Christina Rossetti and Delight In Disorder by Robert Herrick. Most of the poems and authors in this section I had not heard of before, but I enjoyed being introduced to them. The above selections I had never read before, but they have become some of my favorites.

The last section of the book Art, Poetry, and the Making Thereof has selections by such notable authors as Sylvia Plath which gives us Blackberrying and Edgar Allan Poe’s Sonnet – To Science I might mention most of Poe’s writings I am not that fond of but this poem is really good, it is not as depressing as most of his writings. The final poem in the book is by another author I had never read before Tess Gallagher. The poem she wrote is called Deaf Poem I thought this was a terrific poem to end the book with, and also a brilliantly written poem.

I tried to give you a taste above for the poems this book offers. I am sorry for giving you a brief outline, but I don’t think you wanted to spend a couple hours reading my review. You all can thank me later.


Notes

This book was published in 1993 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, the soft back version which what I own has 215 pages and sells for $9.95.


Conclusion

I recommend this book for all who love to read and hear poetry. The scholar will like the book because the editor does offer educational notes, which help us, learn about the poetry and authors of the poems. Also, if like me you just enjoy poetry this book is great it offers many selections of wonderful Poetry.

Adeu, adios, and tres bien for reading, I hope you enjoyed this review, and God Bless the world.


Recommended: Yes