Take a photo of a barcode or cover
cryo_guy 's review for:
The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems
by William Carlos Williams
"These things astonish me beyond words."
This is an excellent small collection of WCW's absolute best. And for being so small it does a pretty good job of displaying his poetic range. From small town odes, to singular images, to over-awed reflections on this cruel state of affairs we call life (and love), Williams has got some great stuff goin on. I've read Paterson which I did a far too extensive review on and a book of essays on him. I know he hated symbolism and was trying to do something different with his poetry. I also know he was kind of an arrogant prick who thought he could bend poetry to his will. But he's also a fairly sensitive poet, not without a certain graceful impartiality and a knack for phrasing.
You can enjoy these poems, representative of him, without getting into all that, making this an excellent recommendation to first time WCW-readers. Otherwise it's got a nice red color to it and the silhouettes of red chickens dotting every other page. I was drawn to the minimalism of it, but it's an otherwise very small book so it wasn't going to take up much shelf-space or time either way. Even if you're not looking to get into WCW, his style of free-verse poetry has been enormously influential in American poetry and is not a bad place to start if you would just like to become more familiar with American poetry of the past century. None of the poems come off as particularly out of date which speaks to WCW's timelessness. I've got two other small collections like this but not quite as new and shiny that I'm planning on reading in the next few months. So I'll continue my discourse on him with them.
I ran across a few I had never read before which were very enjoyable and others were old friends, pleasant to read again. "The Descent" was probably my favorite of the new to me poems. It features the offsetting of text down the page line by line-something usually associated more with Cummings.
" For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
what we have lost in the anticipation--
a descent follows,
endless and indestructible ."
"The Yachts," "These," and "The Ivy Crown" were also really good.
This is an excellent small collection of WCW's absolute best. And for being so small it does a pretty good job of displaying his poetic range. From small town odes, to singular images, to over-awed reflections on this cruel state of affairs we call life (and love), Williams has got some great stuff goin on. I've read Paterson which I did a far too extensive review on and a book of essays on him. I know he hated symbolism and was trying to do something different with his poetry. I also know he was kind of an arrogant prick who thought he could bend poetry to his will. But he's also a fairly sensitive poet, not without a certain graceful impartiality and a knack for phrasing.
You can enjoy these poems, representative of him, without getting into all that, making this an excellent recommendation to first time WCW-readers. Otherwise it's got a nice red color to it and the silhouettes of red chickens dotting every other page. I was drawn to the minimalism of it, but it's an otherwise very small book so it wasn't going to take up much shelf-space or time either way. Even if you're not looking to get into WCW, his style of free-verse poetry has been enormously influential in American poetry and is not a bad place to start if you would just like to become more familiar with American poetry of the past century. None of the poems come off as particularly out of date which speaks to WCW's timelessness. I've got two other small collections like this but not quite as new and shiny that I'm planning on reading in the next few months. So I'll continue my discourse on him with them.
I ran across a few I had never read before which were very enjoyable and others were old friends, pleasant to read again. "The Descent" was probably my favorite of the new to me poems. It features the offsetting of text down the page line by line-something usually associated more with Cummings.
" For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
what we have lost in the anticipation--
a descent follows,
endless and indestructible ."
"The Yachts," "These," and "The Ivy Crown" were also really good.