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crystalisreading's review against another edition
5.0
I admit I'm one of those dreadfully uncultured people that don't really "get" poetry, or really enjoy it. Kinda like opera. But Robert W Service's poetry is amazing. much like Kipling, his poetry is intensely visual and realistic--it takes you to a very specific place, without romanticizing it. and he has some of the brilliant cadences and turn of phrase on a level with Poe. Or so I think. All I know is that while I don't love poetry, I do love this collection. The Harpy is my favorite poem of all time. Read it!
annyway47's review
5.0
There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back—and I will.
I've heard about Robert W. Service for the first time when he was mentioned in [b:The Great Alone|34912895|The Great Alone|Kristin Hannah|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1501852423s/34912895.jpg|56275107], a book about Alaska. So I checked him out and found out that around 1907 Service has written poetry collections about the Gold Rush in Yukon that became classics. Because I loved several books by [a:Jack London|1240|Jack London|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1508674808p2/1240.jpg] on the subject and am a poetry lover as well, it sounded like the perfect discovery. And it was.
I loved the poems themselves, the writing. A lot of the poems were ballads with actual characters, dialogues, and plots, fit to be recounted around a fireplace for entertainment on a long winter night. Some were realistic, others possessed a legend/fairy tale like quality. They were really interesting and unusual both due to the fascinating subject and the incredible atmosphere that the author recreated.
Robert W. Service's characters are wood-cutters, telegraph workers, policemen, whores and, most notably, prospectors. The author did a great job making me really care about them, feel what they felt. The perseverance, the grit, the restlessness, the lust for gold, the loneliness and longing, the love and hate for High North, the beauty and cruelty of Yukon.
This is an outstanding work, I've never read anything like it and enjoyed it immensely. Absolutely recommend.
Were you ever out in the Great Alone,
when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in
with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf,
and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world,
clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red,
the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . .
hunger and night and the stars.
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