Reviews

Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology by Robert Pinsky, Favorite Poem Project (U. S.)

jennyp0208's review

slow-paced

4.5

Very solid poetry anthology. I love the explanations from the people who submitted each poem - this makes the collection more real and human, less academic. 

kellyjcm's review

4.0

I enjoy reading how others respond to particular poems, especially if it is one I have read. I also encountered many new poems to me, including one that I shared with my new boyfriend (who is now my husband).

hyzenthlay76's review

2.0

Many of these poems are stale from too much academic analysis, (though it does make sense to encounter your favorite poem in a Norton anthology...) but I do enjoy the commentarys.

silvernfire's review

4.0

Did I like all the poems? Of course not. But even when a poem left me cold, when all I could muster was a, "Um. Well. Whatever," I found the introductions by the people who'd chosen the poems to be interesting, especially when their lives had been changed by what I thought to be an um-well-whatever poem.

vasha's review

5.0

Quite a revelation reading through this.

psitsbethany's review

5.0

I appreciate this collection of poems even more so as I read the comments included from people explaining why it is a favorite.

crtney's review

4.0

This is an anthology that grew out of the Favorite Poem Project (a project that asked Americans to write to Robert Pinsky and tell him about their favorite poem). It contains 200 poems and some of the reasons that everyday Americans love these poems. It isn't meant to be a collection of the most popular and most loved poems as discovered through some impossible poll and therefore contains a wide assortment of poems and poets--some I loved, some I liked, some I hated, some I didn't understand.

Here are my favorite:

The Emigrant Irish by Eavan Boland
Love Song: I And Thou by Alan Dugan
Things I Didn't Know I Loved by Nazim Hikmet
from the Iliad (Book Six, 439-79) by Homer
Mother to Son by Langston Hughes
The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
On Pilgrimage by Czeslaw Milosz
Block City by Robert Louis Stevenson
Pot Roast by Mark Strand
The Way of the Water-Hyacinth by Zawgee

bookwormmichelle's review

3.0

Was disappointed in this--probably because so many of my favorites did not appear, and also because some was so obscure or even obscene that I do not feel comfortable leaving this around the house for children.