Good Poems For Hard Times - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786280743 ISBN 13: 9780786280742

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2005

Synopsis

A New York Times Bestseller

Garrison Keillor has pondered over the archives of his beloved Writer's Almanac radio show to select a batch of consoling, rousing, and truthful poems guaranteed to raise flagging spirits or to inspire those in need of a dose of wisdom or honesty.

About this title

About the Author

Garrison Keillor, author of nearly a dozen books, is founder and host of the acclaimed radio show A Prairie Home Companion and the daily program The Writer's Almanac. He is also a regular contributor to Time magazine.

From Booklist

Having revived the radio variety program with A Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor turned to broadcasting poetry in the daily short feature The Writer's Almanac. In any given week, probably more people hear him read poems than attend poetry readings and slams. That's good because his taste is excellent. But then, his criteria are golden. For him, a poem is good if it's memorable, recitable, and accessible. The almost-unheard-of-for-poetry sales of Good Poems (2002) suggest that many endorse his taste and criteria, and the sequel to that success gives them no reason to change their minds. As before, the range of poets represented is broad contemporarily (the majority are alive or very recently deceased) and historically (sixteenth to twenty-first century), though not internationally, for, with one exception (Psalm 51), English is these poems' language of origin. As before, too, these are predominantly poems of domesticity and ordinary things, and when a poem touches the genuinely extraordinary, it is related to everyday life; for instance, Stephen Dobyns' "Thelonious Monk" relates a particular instance of a kind of experience virtually everyone has--the discovery of greatness. Even those tired of Lake Wobegon, or who think Keillor's a bigoted Democrat (especially after Homemade Democrat, 2004), should grant that he knows good poetry. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0786280743
• ISBN 13: 9780786280742
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 488
• Editor: Garrison Keillor