Customer Reviews

When elephants last in the dooryard bloomed: Celebrations for almost any day in the year

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...and then delighted! Bradbury's poetry is a mixture of fancy, personal history, articulate emotion, cleverness, history and wit. Special bonus? Sly literary, historical, spiritual, scientific and anthropological references that you pull out of the poem delightedly, with the feeling that you've solved a clever puzzle. I have since read and reread this book, and have collected the rest of his poetry books (not easy, they are hard to find).

This short collection of poems is not bad, considering what trainwrecks books of poems by non-poets can be. Thematically, this book covers the same sort of territory that DANDELION WINE covers in novel form. However, unlike DANDELION WINE, WHEN ELEPHANTS...sheds some of the innocence of the narrator and allows sexual lust and fulfillment to play a role often throughout the work. He has a particular attachment to the word "seeding", which struck me as somewhat out of place, but eventually grew on me.

The poems range from 1 to 5 pages and are generally pretty narrative, though Bradbury does occasionally wander into lyrical wordplay. There are several poems that stand out from the crowd: the opening poem, "Rememberance"; "Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are"; "The Beast Upon the Wire"; and "Old Mars, Then Be a Hearth to Us" were some of my favorites. There are also a fair number of groaners involved, but you can quickly move past them in a book of this sort. Probably the most disturbing aspect of the collection is the dependence on traditional and slant rhyme, a convention that was wearing thin even in the 1970s. It is not in every poem that Bradbury deploys this device, but too often still.

Overall, I would guess that this book is probably going to be for fans of Bradbury's previous work only. If you have not read his novels, they are a much better place to begin. But for an established Bradbury affecionado, this book will be a welcome, and oft-revisited, addition.

Bits of verse from this book come back and bite me in the heart at the most surprising moments.

I love this book.