Reviews for The great American poetry bake-off, fourth series

The average rating for The great American poetry bake-off, fourth series based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-18 00:00:00 Darren Becker While Heaney’s virtuosity as a critic is as well-known and justly admired as his verse, I have a single reservation about this volume, which I first read in 1989, the year of it's publication: “The Indefatigable Hoof-Taps: Sylvia Plath” is marred both by his friendship with Hughes and his own deeply Wordsworthian relationship to nature. The latter renders Heaney unable to see--despite the beautiful elegies for his mother, endearing uxoriousness, and even his typical empathy for women--how frightening primal landscape can appear to the opposite gender. While Plath’s “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” and other poems that indicate a relational, rather than negational, view of the world, pass muster in “The Indefatigable Hooftaps,” Heaney disapproves of Plath’s use of imagery drawn from the Shoah. Many have agreed with his position, including Harold Bloom (See Janet Cameron’s essay “Sylvia Plath’s Use of Holocaust Imagery”-- an unevenly written but succinct summation of various points of view on this topic. Fenton’s oft-quoted rejoinder that “a great deal of art is made from the history of other people's sorrows” always remains worth keeping in mind when reading criticisms of Plath that echo Irving Howe’s “A Partial Dissent,” as does the BBC/Peter Orr interview in which Plath discusses her German/Viennese origins.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-18 00:00:00 James Varnham Obviously, it's Seamus Heaney, so this collection of lectures and miscellanies is well written and acutely observed. Those who with a far more wide-ranging knowledge of poetry than me will get more out of it. Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosc make a number of appearances which will add some context to their entries in The Rattle Bag and The School Bag. Mandelstam also turns up quite a lot. I found (because I'm familiar with it) Heaney's discussion of Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish Houses most enlightening. Robert Lowell (of whom, I've read nothing) less so.