Customer Reviews

Fifty Poems of Emily Dickinson

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Good readings, but the producer apparently felt the poetry can not stand on its own and added background music throughout. It distracts terribly from the music, and never has any relation in mood to the poetry. Avoid this tape.

If you like Emily Dickenson (and I do) you will love this audio cassette. The readers include Meryl Streep, Sharon Stone, and other great female talents. They read the poems with style and a subtility that matches the work of the poet. After hearing the presentations, I came away feeling that the poems were studied by the readers and for the most part understood and delivered accordingly. Thumbs up!

These witty, sly, despairing performances breathe new life and new perspectives into the poems and the poet. Unfortunately, the poems listed on the back of the CD are NOT the poems you hear on the CD, which makes it difficult to know which actress is reading and exactly what she is reading. It's also impossible to directly access a poem directly --- everything falls under a 45 minute Track 1. Finally, this is Fifty Poems of Emily Dickinson, Volume 3. What happened to Volumes 1 and 2? I saw them once as cassettes, but never as CDs.

A CD that contains fifty poems of my favorite poet read in part by perhaps my favorite actress Meryl Streep-- now that's a CD you can tip your hat to-- well not exactly. If there ever was a poet whose works do not need background music while being read, it has to be those of Miss Dickinson. If we have to have music connected with the poems, we can listen to those poems that Aaron Copland and Ned Rorem set to music. The music on this CD had become pretty much a mild aggravation, a little like getting two radio stations on a car radio late at night, when on poem number 33, "The Lonely House," I recognized Robert Schumann's famous "Traumeri" as the music swelled. There is no excuse for this.

The editors have allowed themselves to name some of the poems included here. Anyone who has ever read Dickinson knows that she never named any of her poems and that they are usually identified by first lines. It also would have been convenient for the listener if the words to the poems had been included with the CD. They are not. Neither are we told which reader is reading what poem. (In addition to Ms. Streep, Glenda Jackson, Stephanie Beacham and Sharon Stone read as well. While I recognize Glenda Jackson's voice and Ms. Streep's sometimes, I do not have the faintest idea what either Sharon Stone or Stephanie Beacham's voices sound like. I would gladly have paid more for a better produced CD.

Even all these shortcomings cannot mar the beauty of these rich and wonderful poems with such lines as "the sordid excellence as paradise" if they could just turn off the music! And many of Miss Dickinson's lesser-known poems are included, along with some of those most often anthologized, including my favorite poem "The Bustle in a House."

Joan Allen, of all people, emerges as the stand out in this collection of wonderfully nuanced readings of poet Emily Dickinson's deceptively simple poems on nature and human truths. Just terrific!