Enduring Ties: Poems of Family Relationships (Paperback)

~ Grant Hardy (Editor) "His own parents, he that had father'd him and she that had conceiv'd him in her womb and birth'd him,..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, New York City, National Book Award (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The poems in Enduring Ties, drawn from ancient through contemporary sources, offer a welcome reminder of the many joys of family relationships. 128 poems here provide samples of well-known styles (haiku, sonnet) as well as more obscure forms (tercet, shih) that include selections by Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Nikki Giovanni, and Edward Hirsch. These poems are organized in sections that track the course of a single life: growing up, marrying, childbearing, parenting, growing older, parting, and inheriting.

About the Author

GRANT HARDY is an associate professor and chairman of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He has degrees from Brigham Young University and Yale and is the author of Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History. He and wife Heather just celebrated their twentieth anniversary. They have two children.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Zoland Books; 1 edition (March 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158642064X
• ISBN-13: 978-1586420642
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,240,052 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lovely Gift, June 9, 2003

By	Elizabeth (Gaithersburg, MD) - See all my reviews

This collection shows that family relationships across the ages are not so different from what we have now. The way people can feel about their children, spouse or parents is one of those universal truths. The choice of poems and their arrangement flow beautifully together and express the idea shared human experience. This book can be appreciated by any generation. My mother loved it, I loved and so did my thirteen year-old-daughter. Once you start reading it you are pulled very willingly along to the end. The biographies of the poets are interesting and add another layer of depth to the poems.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Focus on all aspects of family, July 27, 2004

By	J. H Johnson (Salt Lake City, UT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was so moved by the poems in this collection. Because of his obvious knowledge of the Chinese language, he brought forth poems that I would never have had access to before. Having experienced the birth of a child and the loss of the loved one in the same year, it was a wonderful experience to read the poems relating to those life changes. It is so wonderful to read poems compiled by an author who values family!

Janice Johnson

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cherished Volume, September 30, 2003

By A Customer

Grant Hardy has created a collection of poetry that is accessible for the casual reader of poetry, while being a pleasure for the serious student of literature as well. Through his tasteful selection of poems, Mr. Hardy captures the beautiful and sometimes painful gamut of emotion that family life can entail, without lapsing into sentimentality. Mr. Hardy's helpful footnotes give insight into the poetry, and more importantly, into the lives of the poets themselves. The effect is a book that I continually read for wisdom, perspective, and enjoyment. I have given it to family members and friends of all ages, since the poems cover all different stages of family life, so there will always be a topic that one finds pertinent. This book will be a cherished volume in anyone's library.