Details
| Size | | Length: | 618 pages | | Height: | 9.3 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 2.0 in | | Weight: | 36.8 oz |
Industry Reviews
Ciardi, the winner of many awards and honors and a highly esteemed translator of Dante, was one of America's premier modern poets of the latter half of this century. This volume supersedes the earlier Selected Poems (1984), providing a vastly more comprehensive sampling of Ciardi's work: 450 poems culled from over 20 individual volumes published between 1940 and 1993. In it we find testimony to Ciardi's desire to achieve not "a voice," a style formed to forward an author's individuality, but "voice" one that is determined by the externals the poet addresses. If there is "a voice" present in Ciardi's work, it does not appear in any single poem but in what he calls the "total poem of all the others put together...his personality." Highly recommended for all libraries. Thomas F. Merrill, Univ. of Delaware, Newark
Ives
Here is the arithmetic: this collection, edited by Edward M. Cifelli, contains 450 of roughly 725 poems Ciardi wrote during his lifetime culled from 20 books published over a 53-year period (1940-1993). Here are the poetics: an unerring sense of end rhyme, a bravery of language and a depth of scope large enough to contain both a religious tract, "The Lamb" ("Its flesh was Easter") and a Beat elegy for Dylan Thomas ("Saint Binge at death in his own meat"). And here is the topography: the earliest poems seem written from high up, looking down over backyards and train tracks; then, by 1947, we are indeed airborne in Ciardi's best work, a series of beautifully wrought war poems centered on his days aboard a bomber ("See how it clouds: a dream left on the sea"). A slow and professorial dip into peacetime ensues. Academia, God and love are the foci, jarred by a scattering of more war poems that disturb Ciardi's peace like a recurring nightmare. Tangential lines of thought come from a 1967 "Alphabestiary" where "R is for RAT, the noise in man's wall" and from his 1971 autobiography in free verse, "Lives of X." In his final decades, Ciardi is no longer writing from above the backyards, but is in them, downstream from Updike amid a calm but slightly desperate morass of suburban neighbors, birds, bugs and pets a soldier-poet not entirely resigned to the best years of his life. (Apr.)
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