Customer Reviews

Complete Poems

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I believe that it was Robert Frost who commented with regards to modern poetry, that it was like playing tennis without a net. Marianne Moore created her own net - her poetry is built upon strict syllabic counts she imposed upon herself. The result is finely crafted poetry that is never self-indulgent.

I have found her syllabic count to be a good way to introduce structure into student's poetry. I have found it to be a good writing exercise. And in using the structure in these ways, I have become ever more impressed with the quality of work she achieved. But more than the technical quality, I enjoy the humor and just plain fun of her animal poems.

Marianne Moore's poetry is perceptive and unassuming. She often writes with a dry sense of humor. Her interest in sports, especially baseball, is also expressed in her poetry. She enjoys odd behavior in animals and writes about them just as they are. "An Octopus" is one of her longer poems and needs several readings to be appreciated. Moore creates poems that are filled with intuitive insight and beauty.

While I love Marianne Moore's poetry, I wish I could return my Kindle edition of her collected poems. First, as a sidebar, this collected version only contains the three line version of 'Poetry,' which was Moore's final version of the poem; however, in many anthologies, the considerably longer, original version of the poem is printed, and this is the source of the discrepancy at least one other person noted.
Second, my issue with this edition seems to be the mantra of most poetry readers who buy Kindle versions of poems: the formatting stinks. While this edition is not nearly as bad as Kindle's free version of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (which is formatted completely in prose), it does not preserve the formatting of the poetry as originally created by Moore. Moore makes considerable use of indentation, a matter of form which is vital to the function of her poems, and this version does not preserve it - every line is left-aligned. So while this is better than some other poetry collections for Kindle, I would highly suggest purchasing the print version in order to attain the complete experience of Moore's poetry.

Ms. Moore: unfailingly brilliant. Penguin's editors? Not so much. This edition has only the first three lines of Moore's excellent poem "Poetry," and those three are printed inaccurately -- at least in my copy. So much for complete.