Books of Poetry

Sharing more content. It looks like that is all I am capable of at this moment. Anyway, this is better than anything I could possibly come up with out of my head

This is about poetry- it is alright if you like to read poems, but the experience of reading a book of poems by an individual poet is an experience that is not of the ordinary kind-

Reading a poetry book cover-to-cover is a vastly different experience fromreading individual poems. It can be exhausting, as watching an entire opera can be exhausting. ....

I have gotten to know several poets through their books of verse. While, ofcourse, “the narrator is not the poet,” the composition of poetry is an actof personal exposure and the publication of poetry is an act of public intimacy. ....

... In *Tantalus in Love* Alan Shapiro records the inside and outside of a dying marriage with exquisite skill and filigreed detail: his wife’s beautiful body, poised in yoga each morning, just out of touch; his children, watching their parents dancing and laughing together for the last time. Autobiographical or not, volumes of poetry feather open the writer’s human heart and lay it, pinned and spread, on butterfly pages.....

This experience of an emotional or intellectual journey is probably the most valuable, and the most difficult, reward of reading entire volumes of verse.The binding threads are more likely to be ideas or perspectives than characters or conflicts. ...

Read more at Curator, In Praise of the Book.