Wednesday 23 June 2010

GIVEAWAY: Recent reading

What is the most recent book of poetry you've read? Whether last year, or last week, tell us which collection caught your attention recently.

Comment on this post by Monday 28 June, and you could win a copy of Charmaine Papertalk-Green's Just Like That.

8 comments:

  1. I enjoyed "Selected Verse of CJ Dennis". Nice old volume of his verse including the Sentimental Bloke and its follow-ups.

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  2. I've just recently finished WB Yeats Wild Swans of Goole and took the trouble of learning An Irish Airman Foretells His Death for I have a love of flying

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  3. I love Charles Wright's Sestets to bits. Also, A Short History of the Shadow . Closer to home, The Bee Hut, wonderful, just wonderful. Just started Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and this is on the first page:

    Echoes, ripples, and buzzed whispers... loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine

    That is a little bit superb

    What happened with the other giveaway? The music lyrics one? I think the Modest Mouse one was the best

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  4. I have been reading 'Therapy Like Fish' by Marcella Polain and 'Rain' by Don Paterson. A great combination - Paterson goes the big picture letting his conceptual landscapes unfold with lines that are tantalising understated,while Polain hits the grit of the everyday with unflinching honesty graced by the context of our shared human experience.

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  5. I've been enjoying 'smoke encrypted whispers' by samuel wagan watson that I bought during this years writers festival.

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  6. I'm reading Alexander Pope - 'Selected Poems and Letters'.
    I found it at a market and it is wonderful. Equally spellbinding is the Preface, being written in 1962, it is meticulously proper with my favourite sentence being: ..."The Notes have been designed to provide as much information as is necessary to prevent the reader's mind being caught on the snags of obscure reference as he reads."!

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  7. Great to read all your comments - my winter browsing list is shaping up well!

    One of the most extraordinary books of poetry I ever read was Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. I love the potential and economy of a narrative sustained across verse, and Carson's sophisticated knowledge of classical Greece imbues the work. It's what would happen if you put Homer in a barrel with Dorothy Porter.

    For the same reason (the narrative momentum, not the barrel), Barbara Temperton's 'Southern Edge' really does it for me - the development of a narrative in poetic form satisfies the hunger for narrative as well as offering the super-refined sharpness of poetic observation.

    In a different vein, and this was more in the genre of poetry pure, I was recently very pleased to read Denis McMahon's Idle and Drunk in Heaven (Sunline Press) - there are some absolute corkers here.

    Georgia Richter
    Poetry Publisher
    (and poetry reader)

    PS squib: I would love to see the words 'a little bit superb' as an endorsement on the cover of a book of poetry. I for one would buy it!

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  8. The draw revealed that this week's winner is: Colleen O'Grady! Well done, Colleen. Email your postal address to kfalls@fremantlepress.com.au to receieve your prize!

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