Reviews for The poetry of the forties

The average rating for The poetry of the forties based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-03-08 00:00:00 Alyssa Wells The conceit of this volume is that Ruth Padel, poet and descendant of Charles Darwin has chosen sixty 20th century English poems and written a commentary on each one which is printed on the facing page. At one time I read this regularly while eating breakfast. I would read a poem, then the commentary, chew and mull things over for a while then re-read the poem. Muesli, even eaten with yoghurt, is the human equivalent of chewing the cud. The food determined that the breakfast reading be ruminative. The commentaries give views and ideas on what the poem is about and that helped me to read the verses differently. For me this was extremely useful,since I've always found poetry difficult. In theory it's efficient word usage would be a plus, but in practice being a prosaic person prose is more my natural idiom. So the commentary worked because it forced me to stop and consider the possibilities of meaning rather than reading on. The selected poems are all fairly short - though some like the Geoffrey Hill poem are extracted from longer cycles - and they are all fairly modern, the oldest I think from R. S. Thomas. All are from the English speaking world. I don't think that is a terrible choice, it at least avoided the controversies of translation. The joy of a collection like this, even though they are arranged in a couple of broad themes within this notion of a journey through life, is that you can flick backwards and forwards and read a poem or not depending on whether a few words catch at something more than your eye. Here I also read, among others Louise Gluck vita nova. Now instead I listen to the radio news while eating my bread and gargling my coffee...

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-03 00:00:00 Cameron Forbes read for class. enjoyed most of the poems