A History Of The Garden: Poems (Western Literature Series) [Paperback]

Katharine Coles (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

The All-purpose Ending: 1. The Fourth Of July
The All-purpose Ending: 2. Laws Of Conservation
The All-purpose Ending: 3. The All-purpose Ending
Darwin's Orchids
Death Valley: 1. At The Homeless Shelter School
Death Valley: 2. Family Vacation 1: Dante's View
Death Valley: 3. Family Vacation 2: Last Chance Range
Death Valley: 4. Artist's Palette
Death Valley: 5. Winter Solstice
Drought Year
Elegy For A Dog Larger Than Life
Fear Of Falling
Hegira
The History Of The Bicyle: 1. Englisher Garten
The History Of The Bicyle: 2. Dachau
The History Of The Bicyle: 3. The History Of Beauty
The History Of The Bicyle: 4. Deutches Museumbeauty
The History Of The Garden
Natural Disasters
Pantoum In Which Time Equals Space
The Physics Of Flight
Poem For The Last Decade: 1. After The Party Ended
Poem For The Last Decade: 2. Old Houses
Poem For The Last Decade: 3. The Charm
The Poem You Asked For
Vera
The Walk-through Heart
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press; First edition (April 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874172985
• ISBN-13: 978-0874172980
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,106,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, moving and intelligent poetry., December 4, 1997

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[e-mail] (Utah) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A History Of The Garden: Poems (Western Literature Series) (Paperback)

Katharine Coles's book, "A History of the Garden" isone full of beautiful, personal poetry that reveals an intelligentauthor behind the scenes, playing with words and situations. Even in her first poem, "Fear of Falling," Coles, playing with the ideas of gravity and death, writes that the night she was born "a moon as full and hot as August scraped the rooftops." The rest of the poem builds on this, drawing on links between gravity, lightness and death.

In a later poem, "Natural Disasters," she describes a "mother's lifelong rage" as the "slow burn of a wire behind an old house wall," and continues to describe the mother's rage internally and externally, building up to an emotional crisis that, surprisingly, doesn't occur.

What the sum of these poems represent is a clear, scientific approach to poetry; it is poetry that uses science to illuminate and compare, but which is not dehumanized by science. Her poems are full of love, for the earth and for the people in it.