Reviews for Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll

The average rating for Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-11-18 00:00:00 Tom Dinges This is the book that made me fall in love with poetry, and that's BIG, man. When I was 14, 15, 16, I thought this was a book of overwhelming genius, talent, creativity, insanity. How could anyone not love this stuff-it was sooo different. In hindsight, however, I've found that it takes a certain type of person to enjoy Carroll's poetry. Academics, for the most part, seem to have ignored him; he's very similar to ee cummings, minus the eloquence. But he's a NYC poet writing about heroin, rock n roll, pain, heartache, love--seriously, why wouldn't academics love him? I honestly don't know. Maybe the same reason most of them ignore Bukowski. On the other side of the coin, he may be too complex for the everyday reader of poetry. He plays with big ideas, and can be tricky in his use of language. Maybe not tricky, maybe clouded? ambigious? overly figurative? This is probably why his work never goes over well in my creative writing class. what the hell is this guy trying to say? why doesn't he just say what he means???? But it's also why I love him. So here is my favorite poem, from pg 66, the first poem I ever memorized: "Little Ode on St Anne's Day" You're growing up and rain sort of remains on the branches of a tree that will someday rule the earth. and that's good that there's rain it clears the month of your sorry rainbow expressions and clears the streets of the silent armies... so we can dance

Review # 2 was written on 2008-03-11 00:00:00 Jack Shivers, Jr. I first learned of Jim Carroll while watching the Ron Mann documentary Poetry in Motion. The film ended with Carroll reading "Just Visiting," a great prose poem from his The Book of Nods. Fear of Dreaming includes selections from that book, and from his earlier poetic work Living at the Movies. Free verse in which the poet employs strong images to represent his experiences of heroin (needles and veins), Catholicism (saints and sacred objects, feast days), New York (the subways, the streets, the nights), Paris (Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire). Flora (the rose, the tree, the leaf) and nightmare fauna (snakes, dragons, insects).