Good Poems for Hard Times [Hardcover]

Garrison Keillor (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2005

When Garrison Keillor published Good Poems, he touched a chord in readers across America. The anthology of poems he selected for their “wit, their simplicity, their passion, and their utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with” inspired thousands to buy what was for many their first book of poetry.

Now, in Good Poems for Hard Times, Keillor has pondered over the archives of his beloved Writer’s Almanac radio show to select a batch of consoling, rousing, and truthful poems guaranteed to raise flagging spirits or to inspire those in need of a dose of wisdom or honesty. But these poems are not about suffering. They’re intended to reach us and stricken friends by holding out a picture of the grace of ordinary life. Above all, this eclectic anthology, including works from Raymond Carver, Emily Dickinson, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Robert Frost, Kenneth Rexroth, and many more, fit Keillor’s definition of “good”: memorable, beautifully worded, and accessible. They’re not highbrow. They’re not stuffy. But when hard times send us skidding into the meridian, the poems collected here are what we need them to be: just plain good.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Having revived the radio variety program with A Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor turned to broadcasting poetry in the daily short feature The Writer's Almanac. In any given week, probably more people hear him read poems than attend poetry readings and slams. That's good because his taste is excellent. But then, his criteria are golden. For him, a poem is good if it's memorable, recitable, and accessible. The almost-unheard-of-for-poetry sales of Good Poems (2002) suggest that many endorse his taste and criteria, and the sequel to that success gives them no reason to change their minds. As before, the range of poets represented is broad contemporarily (the majority are alive or very recently deceased) and historically (sixteenth to twenty-first century), though not internationally, for, with one exception (Psalm 51), English is these poems' language of origin. As before, too, these are predominantly poems of domesticity and ordinary things, and when a poem touches the genuinely extraordinary, it is related to everyday life; for instance, Stephen Dobyns' "Thelonious Monk" relates a particular instance of a kind of experience virtually everyone has--the discovery of greatness. Even those tired of Lake Wobegon, or who think Keillor's a bigoted Democrat (especially after Homemade Democrat, 2004), should grant that he knows good poetry. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

A remarkable and wide-ranging collection... What a lovely, consoling book. (The New Orleans Times-Picayune)

Those ready to whet their appetites would do well to start with Good Poems for Hard Times. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer) --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (September 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670034363
• ISBN-13: 978-0670034369
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #796,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What more can be said?, September 30, 2005

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Gregg Hazlett - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good Poems for Hard Times (Hardcover)

Really what more can be said? Every poem is a good poem- hmmm, perhaps that is why Keillor calls them... Good Poems? I am a blue collar poem reader. I don't want to understand the free form or debate why the writer used a certain word over another, I like poems that take me away to a familiar memory or experience and most of these poems do just that. It is a book best experienced by candle light with a special someone and/or a great bottle of wine.
Thank you Garrison Keillor for another fantastic book of good poems.

83 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Better Poems, September 22, 2005

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Good Poems for Hard Times (Hardcover)

Garrison Keillor calls his latest book of verse GOOD POEMS FOR HARD TIMES. He could just as easily have called it MORE GOOD POEMS or FURTHER GOOD POEMS since he has produced another anthology every bit as good or better than his previous GOOD POEMS. These 185 poems from 61 named poets-- there are a couple of anonymous poems and a psalm or two-- were selected from Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" radio show so they are the kind you listen to and grasp the meaning of while waiting for the light to change. These poems are meant to speak to ordinary people through what Mr. Keillor calls "the last presence of honest speech and the outspoken heart."

It is worth the price of this book for Mr. Keillor's introduction alone. He opines that America is in "hard times" now with "the levels of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning," with the perversion of religion, a tax system that favors the rich, when newspapers decline and the censor abounds. He fears for a future when America has "no binding traditions," when the public cannot name senators and gets their political knowledge through television and their "only public life at Wal-Mart." He says further about what is already taking place: "You lie in a hotel bed at night, remote in hand and surf a hundred channels of television. . . and you can drift for hours among the flotsam and you will never see anything that shows that you're in Knoxville or Seattle or Santa Fe or Chicago and nobody will ever speak to you as straightforwardly and clearly as poetry does." That's pretty scary stuff.

Mr. Keillor is totally democratic in his choice of writers. The qualifications for inclusion appear to be that the poet be fairly accessible on a first hearing and not long-winded so you need not look for a Pound or Eliot here. These verses are about the rubber meeting the road. There are some heavy-hitters among the poets included, i.e., the ones we read in the Norton American and English Literature anthologies: Auden, Robert Burns, E. E. Cummings, the beloved Miss Emily, Donne, Frost, Hardy, Keats, Shakespeare, Whitman et al. Also included are important modern names-- Wendell Berry, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver-- and a host of good poets I had never heard of before. (I found myself often looking up the bio of a previously unknown writer whose poem I had just been taken with.) Although I understand completely that every editor must discriminate and cannot include everybody, I would have liked included maybe a poem by Cavafy or Mark Doty or Paul McCartney.

The subject matter of these poems is diverse, from 1977 Toyotas and spiral notebooks to baseball, which is not to say that many of the selections are not profound nor beautiful. One of my favorites is Charles Bukowski's "the con job," obviously about the First Gulf War where "the U. S. ground troops were largely/made up of Blacks, Mexicans and poor/whites/most of whom had joined/the military/because it was the only job/they could find." Another is the beautiful and sad "Affirmation" by Donald Hall where the young "row for years on the midsummer/pond, ignorant and content." And Lisel Mueller's exquisite poem about snow, "Not Only the Eskimos."

Finally the biographical sketches of the poets included at the end of this collection usually have a quotation in bold black letters by the writers themselves, often as good as their poems. My favorite is by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: "Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained."

Thank you, Mr. Keillor, for more good poems.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grateful, January 8, 2006

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Anonymous "booksandcookies" (Charleston, IL USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Good Poems for Hard Times (Hardcover)

I am so grateful to Garrison Keillor for bringing so many wonderful poems to my awareness that I might not have otherwise known, whether through his "A Writer's Almanac" on the radio or through his poetry anthologies. He has read or collected so many poems that I have come to love from poets whose work I have sought out as a result of learning about them from him. Garrison Keillor is an American treasure (sometimes a Scandinavian treasure?) and I, one among many, treasure him. This new book is a gem. I gave it to my husband for Christmas and since then have been reading aloud from it. So far, I have laughed! and I have cried! It is a marvelous collection from a wise man and it's just what we need. The Introduction alone is worth acquiring the book, but then the poems...! Thank you, Mr. Keillor.