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Raymond F. Dasmann's life as a conservation biologist during a half-century has embraced both groundbreaking fieldwork and the effort to delineate the concepts which are the intellectual scaffolding of modern ecology. His lifework has been shaped by a passion for the natural world and the desire to solve the environmental problems which threaten the planet. ... Read more

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Describes in verse the nocturnal life of a mother bat and her offspring. ... Read more

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Writers and readers have long been inspired by the haunting wisdom and sheer imaginative power to be found in the fairy tales of the immortal Brothers Grimm. The editors have collected more than a hundred poems inspired by Grimm tales and written by our finest living poets. A brilliant and informative anthology, a teachable text.

Jeanne Marie Beaumont first book of poetry, Placebo Effects, was selected by William Matthews for the National Poetry Series in 1997. She teaches at Rutgers University. Claudia Carlson works at Oxford University Press in New York. Her poems have appeared in Heliotrope, Coracle, Space and Time, Fantastic Stories and NYCBigCityLit.comm

Customer Reviews (2)

Don't Go Into the Woods Without It
THE POETS GRIMM is an essential addition to the collection of anyone who grew up with fairy tales - that is, everyone in America who ever opened a storybook that began "Once upon a time. . ." or watched a Disney movie that opened with a princess tortured by her evil stepmother. Here are the stories from the Grimm brothers collections that terrified and delighted us as children, now revisited with adult distance, wisdom, and humor.Ably edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson, THE POETS GRIMM embraces the breadth of poetry in English in the 20th century, from our most recent poet laureate, Louise Glück, to writers like Terri Windling and Jane Yolen, best known for their work in contemporary fantasy and science fiction.Anne Sexton's important poem, "Twelve Dancing Princesses," from her groundbreaking collection TRANSFORMATIONS, is included, as is an intensely moving poem by Amy Lowell from 1912, which strikes a surprisingly contemporary note.

A deep sympathy for the much maligned usual suspects, wolves and witches, underlies the entire volume, and frankly, if I were Prince Charming, I'd have a call in to my lawyer about a possible libel suit.Perhaps most American of all the Grimm interpretations found here is Tim Siebles' "What Bugs Bunny said to Red Riding Hood," which alone is worth the price of the entire collection.

Reading the poems in this collection bathes the old tales in a new and revelatory light;most telling of all perhaps are the poems which offer new versions of the detailed and mysterious marching orders given to every fairy tale hero or heroine who set off, willingly or not, on a quest. Neil Gaiman's "Instructions," in this vein, makes wonderful new sense of these ever-puzzling rules. Through these poems we see our own childhoods recast, and the clamor of impossibly conflicting childhood directives we all received invoked and examined.

The Poets Grimm offers a wonderful snapshot of poetry of the last half of the last century, taken through an enchanted lens, and I highly recommend it to anyone who ever felt a little cheated by the words, "And they lived happily ever after."

Grimms in Verse
While this collection might appear gimmicky to some, a quick persusal of the table of contents will show that many respected poets have used fairy tale motifs in their work.Beaumont and Carlson have gathered numerous poems from a wide range of poets that reflect the enduring themes and characters we inherited through the work of the Brothers Grimm.The usual suspects, such as Anne Sexton, are here but so are some lesser known poets.The anthology is strong and represents many well-known fairy tales along with a few that are lesser known by the general public.The book is recommended for libraries and classrooms in which poetry and/or fairy tales are taught. It also makes great armchair reading for anyone interested in new interpretations of familiar stories. ... Read more

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"One of the most promising young poet-critics in America" (Los Angeles Times) examines a revolutionary generation of poets.

Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz formed one of the great constellations of talent in American literature. In the decades after World War II, they changed American poetry forever by putting themselves at risk in their poems in a new and provocative way. Their daring work helped to inspire the popular style of poetry now known as "confessional." But partly as a result of their openness, they have become better known for their tumultuous lives—afflicted by mental illness, alcoholism, and suicide—than for their work. This book reclaims their achievement by offering critical "biographies of the poetry"—tracing the development of each poet's work, exploring their major themes and techniques, and examining how they transformed life into art.

An ideal introduction for readers coming to these major American poets for the first time, it will also help veteran readers to appreciate their work in a new light. 6 illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The Surgeon's Gift: Inspiration and Clarity
Adam Kirsch takes his title "The Wounded Surgeon" from T. S. Eliot's poem "East Coker":

"The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part."

In his introduction, Kirsch explains: "T.S. image evokes the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art. . . . But the suffering that afflicted this group of poets becomes significant only because they examined it with the surgeon's rigor, detachment, and skill" (p. xi).

Kirsch does the same--examines with "rigor, detachment and skill"--the body of these six poets' lives and works. His close readings deepen our understanding of how their lives and work intertwined, influenced, and yes, (as the subtitle says) transformed each other.

Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz, and Plath never had a better reader--certainly not in one place. Each chapter illumines the other as Kirsch patiently explores his thesis and shows the rise and (and in the case of Schwartz) the fall of their talents.

Kirch shows their education and work in the context of the literary movements of the time--modernism and The New Criticism. These six poets scrambled a path through Moderism to a new form of poetic expression that would stamp itself on generations of poets to come. This new way of writing allowed the breath and messiness of life to come inside the poem, not be held aloof and at bay outside.

Personally, I especially enjoyed his chapter on Elizabeth Bishop ("Everything only connected by 'and'and 'and'") as Kirch elucidates Bishop's search to "contain loss in art, the scream in the clang." I came away with a profound appreciation of Bishop ascraftsperson (maker), poet, person, and woman...and, can now take these insights back to reading her work.

I also found inspiration and greater clarity for my own work from reading this book. What greater gift can a writer ask?

--Janet Grace Riehl,Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

This Derivative Book is Less than Groundbreaking
Anyone who has read the scholarship on these poets knows that there is really nothing original here.Either Kirsch has not done his homework, or, more likely, he has assimilated much of the relevant schoalrship without acknowedging it in this sparsely documented book.I was excited about this book because I thought it would bea good introduction to some good poets for the general reader.It may well be I'm not the audience for this book, but I noticed that most of the insights had been expressed before by others and more convincingly.This is middle-of-the-road, indeed middling, literary journalism.Kirsch's claims are modest, but he is not--he reinvents the wheel and passes it off as his own singular wisdom at his best and as the wisdom of the ages at his worst.

Not a poet or critic
I have little to no experience with poetry criticism and little appreciation for modern poetry. I was hoping this book would provide me with some education so I could appreciate poetry to a greater extent. Well, it did that and more. I found the book very interesting. Although a "dense" read (I read many sections more than once to understand them), I found it worth my time. I came away with an understanding of these poets and how to read their, and others', poetry. I found the analyses to be straightforward and not full of a lot of insider jargon. Although I have no sense of how much the author's comments are revisionist, repetitive of prior work, or new; I found them to be well-substantiated and supported by some wonderful examples of poems.

Poetic Purging
Adam Kirsch has written an interesting 'surgical procedure' in the THE WOUNDED SURGEON: he defends the so-called 'Confessional Poets' Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz whose work from 1940 through the 1970s, praising "the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art."

In clear and at all times illuminating prose Kirsch examines each of these six poets and relates the personal lives that influenced their major works.Not a gossip column this, but an erudite exploration of how pain and death and disappointment and tragedy of all manner drove these poets to validate their own sorrows and rage rather that imagining those feelings or assigning them to fictitious personages.

While most everyone knows the life and times and resulting poetry of Sylvia Plath (endless biographies and films have seen to that), few of the others' lives are understood. Kirsch sets the record straight and in doing so makes lucid some of the more obtuse works included in this book.

Some would argue that Kirsch's thesis goes on too long, but in getting into the minds and hearts of poets can be a lengthy process. Kirsch has done a fine job of study on these six poets and lets us see how their art transformed their lives by their confessional poetry. Grady Harp, June 05 ... Read more

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In a February 1966 letter to her artistic confidant, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop tellingly grouped four midcentury poets: Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and herself. For Bishop--always wary of being pigeonholed and therefore reticent about naming her favorite contemporaries--it was a rare explicit acknowledgment of an informal but enduring artistic circle that has evaded the notice of literary journalists for more than forty years. Despite the private nature of their dialogue, the group's members--Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman--left a compelling record of their mutual interchange and influence. Drawing on an extensive range of published and archival sources, Thomas Travisano traces these poets' creation of a surprisingly coherent postmodern aesthetic and defines its continuing influence on American poetry.

The refusal of this "midcentury quartet," as Travisano calls them, to voice a formalized doctrine, coupled with their intuitive way of working, has caused critics to miss the coherence of their project. Travisano argues that these poets are not only successors to Pound, Auden, Stevens, and Eliot but postmodern explorers in their own right. In forging their own aesthetic, characterized here as a postmodern mode of elegy, they encountered significant resistance from their immediate modernist mentors Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Marianne Moore.

Jarrell, whom others of the group regarded as a critic of particular genius, was first described as a post-modernist in a 1941 review by Ransom that Travisano cites as the earliest known use of the term. In Jarrell's review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle six years later, he named Lowell a postmodernist and identified traits, among them the use of pastiche, that are now considered by theorists such as Fredric Jameson as specifically postmodern. And Bishop's inventiveness allowed her to adapt a self-exploratory mode often, but imprecisely, termed confessional to challenging forms such as the double sonnet, villanelle, and sestina.

Each of these poets suffered a devastating loss during childhood and lived through the twentieth-century disasters of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the cold war. The continual tension in their poetry between subjectivity and form, claims Travisano, reflects the plight of the fractured individual in a postmodern world. By arguing so sharply for the importance of this circle, Midcentury Quartet is certain to redraw the map of postwar American poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Enduring scholarship
Elegantly meant and beautifully worded, Thomas Travisano's book evinces his love for the poems of this quartet of poets.He does something that's rare, perhaps too rare, in modern literary scholarship--he considers theaesthetics and poetics inherent in the poets' work with a respect usuallyreserved for 'thematics.'His scholarship is a marvel of idea andinvention, the tone modest yet full of authority.Dr. Travisano is theperfect model for younger scholars in his stance toward his subject,reminding readers of the poets' greatness- the qualities of expression andin their complex relationships with their friends-without the self regardthat so often taints scholarly work.The four authors are alive inTravisano's prose; they couldn't have a better scholar on their side. ... Read more