Customer Reviews

Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt

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I first discovered this book on my parent's bookshelf when i was six or seven years old. Bored with sesame street picture books, i read it. I felt rather violated by it at first because many of the poems were impossible for me to comprehend and seemed rather nonsensical to me at the time. Yet I was intrigued. This untraditional book challenged me in a way no robert frost or ogden nash book ever did. Convinced that there was some deeper meaning that I wasn't picking up on, I read the book many times over . The more I read these poems the more i understood them and they began to take on definite shape and character. They began to make A LOT of sense. This book may be a difficult read for a seven year old, but i grew to love it then and i havent stopped loving it since. Now ten years later, at seventeen, let me tell you this is a phenomonal book. I've read a lot of books over the past decade but none of them compare to this one. These poems are so beautiful, so unique, so powerful that they will haunt you for an entire lifetime...Richard brautigan was a genius.

I love Brautigan. This poetry collection is the best I've read of his. There's something about his poetry that distills everything down to a simple unique thought and gives it the attention it deserves. While his prose is beautiful (and poetic) as well, I like his poetry better for it's amazing simplicity and depth. If you've never read a Brautigan, start here, then go to TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA.

I found this book on my father's shelf when I was about thirteen and just beginning to be interested in poetry. Opening it at random, the first three poems I flipped to still sum up today the way I feel about Brautigan: the imagery of "Late Starting Dawn" made me fall in love with poetry, the ideology of "Shellfish" made me fall in love with creation, and the verbiage of "It Was Your Idea to Go to Bed with Her" made me fall in love with the English language. Though his poetry is simply constructed, that simplicity is the perfect format for his beautiful understanding of and attraction to words. Richard Brautigan puts human life, from the intellectual pursuits to sexual endeavors, into such physical proximity with the reader that one is left with the feeling of looking someone in the eyes and understanding them for the first time. His passion for the aesthetics of words and life is astoundingly apparent. These poems will make you want to live your life beautifully, and help you see that you already do.

Richard Brautigan was crafty. I read once that he wanted to write the perfect poem and that poem would be about the shortest period of time one could imagine. That poem would be one word. Nobody has ever heard the word yet. It hasn't been created. Everyone knows what it means. We've always known. If you are buying your first Brautigan book I highly reccomend starting here and finishing when you own everything he's written.

Do you think of me as often as I think of you?

R. Brautigan

The photo on the cover would be worth the price of the book even if the poems were awful, and they're not. In fact, they're great. Light, withought being trivial, this one's a quick read that stays on. Brautigan's uniqe humor is pervasive and nothing is quite as simple as it might seem at first glance. Warning: Don't think about them too much. These are not grab on and chew kinds of poem-lettes. They're funny ineffable little beasts. I especially like Donner Party and Clad in Garments Like a Silver Disease. A great book just to have knocking about the house. Rock on Brautigan!

rommel drives down in egypt and me too .
to far from home .
to good to dislike