Fatherhood: poems about fathers (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307264580 ISBN 13: 9780307264589

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2007

Synopsis

A celebration of fathers and fatherhood, this one-of-a-kind anthology features the richly varied voices of daughters and sons, and of fathers and grandfathers themselves.

From eleventh-century Chinese poet Su Tung-p'o's witty "On the Birth of His Son" to Dylan Thomas's poignant "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," from Sylvia Plath's searing poem "Daddy" to Yeats's tender "A Prayer for My Daughter," from Homer to Seamus Heaney, from Shakespeare to Milosz, the poets and poems collected here range across cultures and centuries and speak to birth, death, and all the facets of the father-child relationship. Gratitude, tenderness, and awe infuse some of the poems. Others express anger or sorrow. Many are moving tributes to the first man in a child's life. And each one conveys the profound nature of fatherhood.

About this title

About the Author

Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of the anthology First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them, and the former editor of the Journal of the Poetry Society of America. A graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism, she lives in New York City.

From Booklist

The first verse in this thematic anthology, "Golden slumbers kiss your eyes," gives us pause. Doesn't Paul McCartney honk it out at the end of Abbey Road? Indeed he does, but he didn't write it. It is instead by, or at least attributed to, Shakespeare's contemporary and, according to Stanley Wells' Shakespeare and Co (2007), collaborator, Thomas Dekker, one of the handful of Elizabethans/Jacobeans who are most of the eldest poets represented. The eldest, however, is Chinese: Su Tung-p'o (1037–1101), whose wry, satiric "On the Birth of His Son" may be the most modern piece in the book. Besides father-to-son poetry, editor Ciuraru includes son-to-father, daughter-to-father, and father-to-daughter poems in moods ranging from tenderness to rage and covering the parent-child relationship from birth to death, the latter of both parent and child. She doesn't shrink from chestnuts, including even the oft-lampooned nineteenth-century pop song "Come Home, Father!" but perhaps most of the selections are by twentieth-century and living poets. Consequently, if this isn't the definitive book of poems on fatherhood (how could it be?), it's an awfully satisfying one, nevertheless. Olson, Ray

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0307264580
• ISBN 13: 9780307264589
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Carmela Ciuraru