Reviews for Nighthawk's Dreams and Selected Poems by Thomas Hardy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Shakespeare

The average rating for Nighthawk's Dreams and Selected Poems by Thomas Hardy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Shakespeare based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-03-22 00:00:00 Cleaves Bennett Read: June 2020 Rating: 5/5 stars, best of 2020 This beautiful book of poetry centres the idea that living poets of today can 'answer back' to poets from the past and this concept is wonderfully executed. I have been introduced to some contemporary poets that I want to read more from; U.A. Fanthorpe's passionate retort to Walt Whitman's The Beasts, Carol Rumens' own version of Larkin's This Be The Verse and Clare Shaw's heart-breaking The No Baby Poem puts them firmly on my radar. There were also long gone poets that I have never heard of before whose words moved me, especially William Carlos Williams' 1938 haiku-like poem The Red Wheelbarrow and Greek poet C.P. Cavafy's Ithaka (1911). I highly recommend this collection to all lovers of poetry.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-23 00:00:00 Kim Huynh I'm not a big reader of poetry, but I'm glad I read this, both for the opportunity to revisit poems by A.E. Housman, W.H. Auden, Christina Rossetti, Ben Jonson, and D.H. Lawrence (who knew he had a sense of humour?), but also to see how contemporary poets have responded to their predecessors. I particularly appreciated the 'piss-take' poems, the tongue-in-cheek response that Duffy gives to Kipling, that Tony Curtis gives to Allen Ginsberg ('I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by DIY'), and that Carol Rumens gives to Philip Larkin ('Not everybody's / childhood sucked: / There are some kiddies / Not up-fucked'). And it would be difficult not to be moved by the elegy Owen Sheers has written in response to John Donne's 'To his Mistress Going to Bed'. Not all the 'answers back' are successful, though: some are dull, others are pretentious - that's why I've given this 3 stars rather than 4.