Reviews for Instructions for honey ants and other poems

The average rating for Instructions for honey ants and other poems based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-09 00:00:00 Jony Sam The title alone tips you off to this being one of those sturdy, reassuring, old school studies aimed at that Questing Beast of contemporary poetry, the general reader. Young is thoughtful and seemingly allergic to pretension, colloquial without coming off as condescending and personal but not TMI-confessional. I'm congenitally addicted to studies like these and the audience they're pitched for: autodidact and unspecialized, but no less committed to the adventure of reading for that.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-20 00:00:00 Thomas Balcerski Because Jarrell was an aphoristic literary critic, the best way for those who haven't read him to see what he's like is to share a few of his aphorisms: Emphasizing the poet over the poem is like "someone who, because he has inherited a pearl necklace, can never again look at an oyster without a shudder of awe." "Surely it is the excellence most unlike our own that we will be most eager to acknowledge, since it not only extends but completes us — and since only we, not the excellence, are harmed by our rejection of it." "Readers, real readers, are almost as wild a species as writers; most critics are so domesticated as to seem institutions—as they stand there between reader and writer, so different from either, they remind one of the Wall standing between Pyramus and Thisbe." "When you organize one of the contradictory elements out of your work of art, you are getting rid not just of it, but of the contradiction of which it was a part; and it is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent to us ... our world and our selves."