Customer Reviews

The Giant Book of Poetry

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Five hundred and sixty poems give a very wide-ranging overview. Poems old and new include many standards and favorites, and are sure to introduce you to many new favorites as well. It certainly includes a lot of mine, such as Persimmons by Li-Young Lee.

The selection is sophisticated enough to be an introductory textbook, but also very accessible for the home, with plenty of aids such as notes on each poem, an explanation of meter, and something I wish a lot more anthologies had: a subject index.

If you're going to have one collection of poetry--or at least a first collection--this could be it.  And if you really want to relish it, the leather-bound edition does look tempting.
 
Additional note:  The publisher has also produced a set of CDs that include many of the poems from the book, read by a variety of voices. With matching cover designs, the book and CDs make a whole set for the budding poetry enthusiast.

The feature that must be mentioned first is that this book is aptly named. It is truly a "giant book of poetry". At 640 pages it is packed solid with pure poetry in all its beautiful manifestations. They cover the work of poets born in time spanning time from around 4,000 BC to 1984. They were chosen with no specific criteria except that the editor liked the poem. Luckily for the reader William Roetzheim has widely varied tastes so there is something for everyone in this anthology.

The introduction of the book and the appendix are both devoted to educating the reader as to the type and role of poetic meter . Roetzheim is able to clearly explain the styles that make up the many types of poems included in his book. It is a well described education for anyone who is unfamiliar with the components of poetry and how they are used..

What sets this book aside from other poetry anthologies, besides sheer volume, is the editor's personal comments and asides in the form of footnotes. Each poem's form is noted and there is often other remarks as to vocabulary, meaning or even history of the poem. For instance his footnote to Robert Frost's "Good-by and Keep Cold" is "there is an underlying message of needing to trust faith after you have done everything you can to protect of prepare something (someone) that you love." He adheres to the common interpretations of meanings so that new scholars will be informed as to usual thoughts. Vocabulary definitions will be appropriate for younger readers.

Although he spent much of his pervious life as an owner of software companies and author of an extensive number of technical books and articles, Roetzheim retired to be a poet. His work can be found included in this edition. Anyone looking for a very comprehensive volume of classic poetry will find this to be the book they want. It is especially suitable as a first poetry book for both new devotees or students of the art.

Simple black-and-white illustrations add a rustic touch to The Giant Book Of Poetry, a 750-page anthology of some of the most important poems and poets of all time. Spanning an immense spread of authors, from an anonymous poet writing in 4000 BC to familiar names such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and many more, The Giant Book Of Poetry is truly a moving compendium ideal for the library of any poetry lover. An extremely comprehensive index of the poems by title, subject, and first line allow for quick and easy lookup of a favorite verse. Jokun: Ah! I intended / never never to grow old... / Listen: New Year's Bell!

For William Roetzheim, Life and Poetry are apparently inseparable. The guy simply loves to read (voraciously) and write (with craft and feeling) the stuff, and he wants the rest of us to also. He has educated himself in the history and techniques of verse and approaches the challenge of editing an anthology from every possible angle: inclusivity, contextualizing, cross-indexing, pedagogical footnoting, and the juxtaposition of the canonical with his personal favorites. Thus the truly Giant Book should satisfy the needs of teachers, students, acquisition librarians, and those who, like Roetzheim, are hopelessly addicted to the artful, measured human utterance.

I bought the Kindle version of this book and I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The poetry does not lose any format in the e-book version and the various poems and authors are easily accessible. Also, the footnotes are easy to get to, which I had found in some e-books to be next to impossible to find.

As for the anthology itself, I can only give the highest acclaim. The range and variety of poetry and poetic schools in this book is astounding. Rarely outside of a university textbook, can one go through so many different time periods and schools of poetry. Even then, this anthology exceeds many textbooks in that it is not limited to one school, time period, or nationality of poetry.

If you are expecting academic influence in this book in the way of editors and long introductions to authors and schools of poetry, you will find little. What this anthology amounts to is one man putting together his favorite poems by his favorite poets. That being said Roetzheim still gives wonderful insight into each poem with footnotes including rhyme scheme, meter, themes of the poem, and definitions for the more obscure words.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in poetry. It is a great collection for everyone from those new to poetry to college professors and everyone in between.

Dilemma

"I want to be famous so I can be
humble about
being famous
What good is my humility
when I am stuck
in this obscurity?"

~ David Budbill

In my search for good poems I've often had to wade through the mediocre and mundane to get to the memorable. By reading an anthology I hope to find that someone else has done this job for me and has collected the best of the best. This is sometimes true but tastes vary. So it is with some trepidation that I enter the world of an editor who has selected what he or she feels are essential poems to be read at your leisure.

This book contains more contemporary poems than many anthologies which seem to focus more on classic poems. This book has plenty of classic poems and quite a few finds that I haven't seen in other poetry books over the years.

I enjoyed finding Elizabeth Bishop's funny poem about losing things and David Budbill's poem about wanting to be humble and famous. I was delighted to find poems by Billy Collins as I've reviewed quite a few of his books in the past. Reading this anthology also taught me something interesting about bats. You just never know what you are going to find in an anthology. Some of the great poems include:

"Trees" by Joyce Kilmer
"My Madonna" by Robert Service (pretty funny)
"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" by Edward Lear
"All the World's a Stage" by William Shakespeare
"To the Virgins" by Robert Herrick
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wortdsworth
"An Argument" by Thomas Moore
"Anabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe

Even though this book is very long and takes quite a while to read when I got to 50% and found Billy Collins poems I did say "YAY!" Because mostly I was looking for contemporary poems. But alas there were very few and by 60% the poems were over.

Well I am still happy I read this anthology because I found some funny poems. With so many poems to sort through this really does become quite an adventure. About 80% of the poems in this book were unknown to me. So this introduced me to quite a few new poets I may not have come across that easily.

~The Rebecca Review

William Roetzheim has created in this book one of the most comprehensive collection of the various styles of both prose and poetry I have seen in one publication. The problem with many books that promise to deliver an overview on a broad plain of poetic styles is they far too often tend to favor a certain era, or group of poets, despite good intentions. Poetry, like fine art, are both very discerning fields of talent where far too many enthusiasts fall victim to a perspective that the style of poetry they favor, is the only kind worth either appreciating, or knowing anything about at all. Unfortunately this tunnel vision approach to the joys of poetry tends to color their objectiveness in presenting a versatile collection for ones consideration. One would be hard pressed indeed to acquire a knowledge of where Roetzheim's true passion and appreciation as to style and era happens to lie by reading this book. It is a thorough, entertaining, educational, and totally objective collection...

Quite simply put, there is a wealth of beauty, romance, heartache, description, and interpretation to be enjoyed and admired in any era, or style of poetry. And William Roetzheim has done a superb job of collecting what I consider a beautiful portrayal of poetry of all expressions down through the ages. You will find selections here of everything from the pen of masters like Keats, and Lord Byron, all the way up to both young and upcoming, as well as known, established contemporary poets. I have not come across a better selection anywhere, and I have seen a lot...

This is the kind of book that one will be comfortable with just thumbing through and picking out a random piece here and there, or curling up with like a romance novel and losing yourself in for a just a while. Roetzheim's guide that follows along the pages as helpful footnotes as to form and interpretation is both entertaining in of itself, and very informative as well. It's my opinion that whether you are a fledging poet that enjoys the fine work of others like yourself down through the decades, or are someone that just loves reading verse that can sometimes literally create a moment in time as real and as vivid as any piece of art, I think you will very much enjoy this book. Highly recommended...

I'm using this book as a text for a course and I'm so happy to have it as a survey of great poems. However, I'm disappointed that the editors allowed the poems to be printed without the poets intended layout. For example a sonnet is meant to be in four stanzas: four lines for the first three and two lines for the last. When there are no breaks between stanzas it all but destroys the initial impact of the poem, and requires research to ascertain it's correct form. I'm sure I'm missing a lot because I don't always know to do this. The worst disservice is done to a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins who is not easily accessible for modern readers but whose reach is ecstatic when understood and deeply felt. All tools to penetrate the poem are critical. I hope these errors are corrected in the next edition.

Disappointing. The collection lacks many of the standards that a lot of people think are essential to understanding the last century of poetry: Missing from the collection are Yeats' The Second Coming, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Tennyson's Ulysses, and Carl Sandburg's Fog or Chicago, among others. No poems at all are included by such modern masters as e.e.cummings, Allen Ginsberg, John Crowe Ransom, or Theodore Roethke. In spite of its size and wide ranging selections from world poets and personal favorites, the book doesn't have the basics that are necessary for a good anthology or poetry text.

I have used this book several times in my Introduction to Poetry classes. The poems are wonderfully selected: accessible, funny, beautiful, wise. The black and white illustrations are perfect, and the footnotes are restrained and helpful. As good an anthology as I've come across.