Customer Reviews

First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them

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This is a beautiful book. I heard a reading by several of the poets in First Loves read at Three Lives in NYC, and the room was transfixed. This book will open up so many doors to poems you may not have read, or read in years. Then it will make you think of the first time you fell in love with a poem, and eventually you'll be thinking about the first time you fell in love with a piece of music, a piece of art, and so on. Thanks to Carmella Ciuraru for conceiving of this wonderful collection, and to the poets for their honesty.

From BOSTON REVIEW:

First Loves [is] a moving and intimate testimony... Ciuraru's anthology is a kiss of many valences, from the skyrockets of John Donne's "The Flea," (Billy Collins' pick) to the expansive playfulness of Wallace Stevens' "The Man on the Dump," (James Tate's pick) to the cultural fulchrum of Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole," (Eavan Boland's pick). And while it is impossible to typify the works collected here, the poem that perhaps most epitomizes the spirit of First Loves is Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky," a work of ebullient music and diction which perches on the edge of apprehension.  It's this fertile territory of "knowing before understanding" that many of the writers revisit, parsing the moment out in prose which is deeply considered, flush and inspiring.  In returning these poets to the source of their obsession, Ms. Ciuraru has managed the welcome trick of culling together an unassailable anthology. Page after page of guileless enthusiasm is, sooner or later, contagious, recommending First Loves to new readers of verse and the critically sophisticated alike.  For while the poems featured in this collection are (by frequent concession) uneven in quality, so too (by frequent concession) is first love.  It can be awkward and fumbling, but for these poets it is also the maiden scrape with the world that will define them.  Beneath the celebratory tone of these essays is the powerful undercurrent of self-recognition. -Sam White

Ciuraru asks 68 well-known poets, "What poem has haunted you, provoked you, obsessed you, made you want to speak back to it?" In response, each writer provides one example and a short essay. The results are at once magical and mundane[...] FIRST LOVES--intense, unsentimental--is a startling, inspirational anthology. -Ken Tucker

Simply a series of short essays in which poets comment on the poems that first awakened them to poetry. Fortunately, the poets seem to have felt no need to be "poetic" in their essays, which are all fairly straightforward and insightful. The poems themselves are, of course, included as well. It's interesting to see the diversity of poems that others have found meaningful and to hear their explanations as to why: Two selected "Jabberwocky" to my mild surprise, while another selected "Suzane Takes You Down" and another selected a Rodgers & Hammerstein lyric. Others selected more obscure poems that I find it hard to believe anyone would regard as meaningful, but that's the charm of this book. The one who selected "For a Dead Kitten" ("How could this small body hold / So immense a thing as Death?") is my new Favorite Poet, even though I've never heard of her or read anything she's written.

Poetry can be inspiring, uplifting and daunting. This book, however, takes a tack which will inform even the most casual poetry reader. Editor Carmen Ciuraru asked writers to name the poem which inspired them to write -- so, in this handy volume, you get a short essay about a poem and then get a chance to read the poem itself. It includes a wide range of poets and poetic forms, from Yeats and Dickinson to Rilke and Williams. It's also fairly easy to read because you can select certain essays to read in one sitting. This is a perfect book for those who think they like poetry and don't exactly know where to start.

This collection of poets' discussions of poems that influenced them presents various voices on various (and sometimes surprising) poem choices. The collection offers a view of poems, both familiar and unfamiliar, and a peek into poets' tastes and choices of poems. This is a wonderful book for readers of all levels of experience with poetry.

...I have been eating poetry.' The quote at the beginning of the book is now, since reading it, my poetry mantra.This book is a delight.Others share their favourite poems after their reason why/or the reason/s they love poetry.There is a real mix of selections, which make a pleasurable read for anyone with a taste for poetry.

An anthology that proves that the gift of heartbreak are the art forms that celebrate a testament to the lost love, such as poetry that allows the remembrance of that love to live forever.

Think about your childhood, or the time when, as a teenager, you idly turned the page onto a poem that forever changed your world. Then multiply that experience by 68 and you have the contents and flavor of FIRST LOVES. edited by Carmela Ciuraru. Some of the poets she asked to contribute are already no longer with us, so their comments here have a slightly valedictory quality which makes this book even sweeter now, than when it first appeared three years ago.

It is also a good book to share with your own children. What's nice to know is that, in the middle of today's crazy world, young people are still stumbling across their very first poem, and again are succumbing to the pleasures of the word. A noble book, filled with lasting memories.