CCBC-Net Archives
Poetry
- Contemporary messages sorted: [ by date ] [ by subject ] [ by author ]
From: McClelland, Kate <mcclelland>
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 18:07:03 -0400
I do not feel that I qualify as an expert in evaluating poetry, but I am an expert in the feelings that poets can evoke within me. Two poets especially come to my mind as we talk about poetry.
Naomi Shihab Nye literally takes my breath away in the way she uses language to describe closely observed, small moments of life with seemingly common words that turn to magic in her pen. It is hard for me, after reading Nye's poems (aloud), not to "notice", not to think in images, not to begin to write my grocery list in verse, so lastingly does her voice resonate. Her work sings in my head and on my tongue.
I "met" Marilyn Nelson through her 2002 Newbery Honor, Carver, a life in poems. She often makes me feel like I have sustained a gut punch. In her CSK Honor book, Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, Nelson combines a requiem to honor the dead with the concept of manumission, the freeing of a slave. As she says, it sets "grief side by side with joy." Arguably the single most difficult, heartbreaking and affecting page printed in 2004 is page 15 in Fortune's Bones, "Dinah's Lament." This year's A Wreath for Emmett Till may be even more venturesome. It uses the form of "heroic crown of sonnets" a sequence in which the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next. The last sonnet is made up of the first lines of all the preceding, and is also an acrostic. She unfailingly makes the unspeakable heart-stoppingly and powerfully expressive. Kate McClelland Perrot Library, Old Greenwich CT
Received on Tue 05 Apr 2005 05:07:03 PM CDT
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 18:07:03 -0400
I do not feel that I qualify as an expert in evaluating poetry, but I am an expert in the feelings that poets can evoke within me. Two poets especially come to my mind as we talk about poetry.
Naomi Shihab Nye literally takes my breath away in the way she uses language to describe closely observed, small moments of life with seemingly common words that turn to magic in her pen. It is hard for me, after reading Nye's poems (aloud), not to "notice", not to think in images, not to begin to write my grocery list in verse, so lastingly does her voice resonate. Her work sings in my head and on my tongue.
I "met" Marilyn Nelson through her 2002 Newbery Honor, Carver, a life in poems. She often makes me feel like I have sustained a gut punch. In her CSK Honor book, Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, Nelson combines a requiem to honor the dead with the concept of manumission, the freeing of a slave. As she says, it sets "grief side by side with joy." Arguably the single most difficult, heartbreaking and affecting page printed in 2004 is page 15 in Fortune's Bones, "Dinah's Lament." This year's A Wreath for Emmett Till may be even more venturesome. It uses the form of "heroic crown of sonnets" a sequence in which the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next. The last sonnet is made up of the first lines of all the preceding, and is also an acrostic. She unfailingly makes the unspeakable heart-stoppingly and powerfully expressive. Kate McClelland Perrot Library, Old Greenwich CT
Received on Tue 05 Apr 2005 05:07:03 PM CDT
