House Without a Dreamer (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize Library) [Paperback]

Andrea Hollander Budy (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This collection, winner of the 1993 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, might seem a natural in this age of family values, celebrating, as it does, house and home, parents and children, passion, love, and marriage. The poems go far beyond the surface of these matters, however, and, whether greeting the dawn or charting the progression of passion or funeral preparations, explore the subtle nuances of emotion. In "Dawn," Budy writes of this need to explore, discover, and experience the subtleties attending the delicate instant of change: "I've come dawn after dawn / to slow it down, to trap it. / I want to know what it is. / Not scientifically, / but with my whole body /. . . I have to know what it's like / the moment that ice is not ice anymore / but isn't yet water." These stark, stripped-down verses and images convey layers of complexity: "Passion / travels in the dark--the animal / we do not truly know, the one / we never pet, the one so foreign / to our lives we do not have a sense / of what it eats or where it sleeps, and only know / its death." These are poems for all seasons. Whitney Scott

Review

Advice
Asleep In The Forest
Because We Have Been Married A Long Time
Beginning And Ending With Lines From Shakespeare
Black
Buttons
Choice
The Color Of The Sky
Dawn
Fire
Firmly Married
Getting Back
Gretel
Grief
Jack Sprat
Just
The Line
No One Wants To Be The Witch
The Old Woman Who Lives In A Shoe
One For The Money
Permission
Pigs
Poem For My Brother, Manager Of Go-go Bar In Roselle Park, New Jersey
Snow White
Soup
Therapy
This
This Is An Answer
This Is Not A Letter But Another Poem
This Will Be My Only (1)
Trying To Explain: 1. The Field
Trying To Explain: 2. The Beach
Trying To Explain: 3. The Woods
Trying To Undrstand What Isn't Said
Weeds
What I Want
What I Will Be When I Cannot Be With You
What You Find
When She Named Fire
When You Hear His Name
Women At Fifty
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 75 pages
• Publisher: Story Line Press; First American Edition Stated edition (October 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0934257833
• ISBN-13: 978-0934257831
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,967,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You can read it again and again, May 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: House Without a Dreamer (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize Library) (Paperback)

This is, without a doubt, one of my favorite books of recent poetry. Among her many other talents, AHB cleverly recasts fairy tales, without falling victim to Adrienne Rich's tendency to find mythology in everything, and her poetic felicity goes far beyond ironic versions of folk wisdom. She'll teach you about pain and aging, yet her profundities don't ring pedantic. She'll humor you without sacrificing her poetic integrity. I cannot say enough in praise of her craft. Too many writers continue to pass off broken prose as poetry, yet AHB pays close attention to line and teases you with occasional amphibolic turns of phrase. Her emotional insight into relationships and her ability to render those relationships with candor makes her poetry familiar, yet she achieves this without sacrificing the strength of her subversive moments. This book is a joy to read again and again.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple and poignant, April 13, 2010

By 

Katya (East Bay, CA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: House Without a Dreamer (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize Library) (Paperback)

House Without a Dreamer is a delightful collection of beautiful musings on ordinary, daily life. The poems themselves deal with simple things, and the words are simple, and read and flow effortlessly from the mouth. They speak of love, married love, making love, decades together; sometimes this love goes sour and marriages become broken but companions remain together. They speak of passion and youth. They reveal Budy's profound appreciation for and personal relationship with the earth, with living things, the sky, the sunrise. They also capture glimpses of cherished people in her life. A button between cracks in the ground becomes a story because it was found and taken in and treasured. A velvet jacket is the dark sky, a jacket that hangs in her mother's closet, that she would find as a child in the dark closet and feel safe. I love these poems because they are so unassuming, so real and human. I feel like I could be the "I" whose words I am reading. Some of them make me wish I were that poet, telling those stories and bearing those memories. The final poem, "Dawn," was one that took hold of me with particular force because of how it told of Budy's closeness with what I ignore most days because I "have no time": sunrise, the intangible passing of time, "the precise moment/ today became yesterday;/ tomorrow, today." The watching and waiting described in this poem, a repeated endeavor, reminds me of what I wish I could do myself: to live a life in which what is so precious and beautiful is cherished for what it is.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mistress of Otherness, September 25, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: House Without a Dreamer (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize Library) (Paperback)

Budy's poems take us places, within familiar surroundings, we haven't really been before, or try hard to deny acknowledging. Budy unswervingly engages all that is human and mystical in our time. She can inspire the beasts of the jungle and the chicekens themselves to dance!