Dec 09 2022
This sweet picture book on what it means to be a true friend is a delight for adults and children both. The poem by Julie Fogliano tells the tale of two quite different children who don’t seem to be getting along. But as the book progresses, readers see that the kids, who seemingly began by …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/09/i-dont-care-by-julie-fogliano-molly-idle-juana-martinez-neal/
Dec 05 2022
The first time I read The Odyssey, I was on a bit of an odyssey myself: from Budapest to Helsinki, and thence to DC via London. It didn’t take ten years, and I didn’t feel the need to plot a bunch of murders when I reached my new home. Nor did I lose my ship …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/05/the-odyssey-translated-by-emily-wilson/
Dec 04 2022
Usually when I am reading one of Seamus Heaney’s collections, I use a slip of paper as a bookmark and note the poems that strike me as particularly interesting or effective, so that I can have them fresh in my mind when I write about them for Frumious, or as a guide when I return …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/04/the-spirit-level-by-seamus-heaney/
Oct 29 2022
In the first hundred pages of the book of her translation of The Odyssey, Emily Wilson introduces readers to this three thousand year old epic poem that is one of the foundations of Western literature. She opens doorways to the poem for readers not already well versed in Homer, but she also makes clear that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/29/premature-evaluation-the-odyssey-translated-by-emily-wilson/
Oct 26 2022
Czeslaw Milosz has a captivating mind. In Native Realm he invites readers to join him on what his subtitle calls “A Search for Self-Definition,” and is a journey from the wooded interior of what is today Lithuania, where he was born into a family of Polish-speaking gentry, through his young adulthood in interwar Warsaw, past …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/26/native-realm-by-czeslaw-milosz/
Jul 22 2022
Seeing Things returns to a greater length, though many of its poems — particularly the 48 in Part II, “Squarings” — are short; the squarings are all twelve lines each. “Glanmore Revisited” offers seven sonnets in its short sequence. “The Schoolbag” is also sonnet length, while “1.1.1987” and “An August Night” are three lines each. Compact …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/07/22/seeing-things-by-seamus-heaney/
Feb 25 2022
Only having read The Odyssey could be a bit of a hindrance in addressing a collection titled The Triumph of Achilles, especially when my notes show that that the title poem is one that struck me as I was reading through. Even without commanding the details of The Illiad, though, I liked the considerations Glück …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/25/the-triumph-of-achilles-by-louise-gluck/
Feb 23 2022
The receipt tucked away in the pages of this collection tells me that I bought it in early 1997, in Washington, DC. At that time, I would only have read Heaney’s Nobel lecture. His Beowulf, the first poetic work of his that I read, was still two years from publication. There’s another receipt in the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/23/selected-poems-1966-1987-by-seamus-heaney/
Feb 06 2022
Seamus Heaney followed his longest collection, Station Island, with one of his shortest, The Haw Lantern. Like several of his other collections, The Haw Lantern has a tripartite structure; unlike the others that I have read so far, its sections are not explicitly marked. Nevertheless, the ten sonnets that Heaney wrote in memory of his …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/06/the-haw-lantern-by-seamus-heaney/
Dec 17 2021
Hrm, well, if I’d known this was essentially a memoir by a woman in her 40s, I would have probably skipped it (as I do for memoirs by men in their 30s, and for roughly the same reasons.) I feel that the 40s are a bad age for a woman to try to do a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/17/spilexm-a-weaving-of-recovery-resilience-and-resurgence-by-nicola-i-campbell/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire