Product Description
HAZMAT, meaning “hazardous material,” is an abbreviation familiar from signs at the entrances to long dark tunnels or on the sides of suspicious containers. Here, in a series of stunning poems, J. D. McClatchy examines the first hazmat we all encounter: our own bodies. The virtuosic “Tattoos” meditates on why we decorate the body’s surface, while other poems plunge daringly inward, capturing the way in which everything that makes us human–desire and decay, need and curiosity, the jarring sense of loss and mortality–hovers in the flesh. In the midst of it all is the heart, its treacheries, its gnawing grievances, its boundless capacities.

With their stark titles (“Cancer,” “Feces,” “Jihad”), McClatchy’s poems work dazzling variations on this book’s theme: how we live with the fact that we will die. Crowned by the twenty-part sequence “Motets,” which deals out an exquisite hand of emotional crises, this collection brings us a sumptuous weave of impassioned thought and clear-sighted feeling. Holding up a powerful poetic mirror, McClatchy shows us our very selves in a chilling series of images: the melodrama of the body being played out, as it must be, in the theater of the spirit.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Hazmat
Hazmat was a wonderful collection of all sorts of poems. There were Tankas, and Haikus, and even some I didn't know such as Canzone, and Epigram. I thought that these forms were really intricate, and hard to do. I did enjoy the word use though. I thought that it was really cool the way he used words, and painted pictures. An example that sticks in my mind is; She blacks her hair, and powders her face, getting ready to fight the evil. I would recommend this awesome collection to anyone who enjoys grammar and is interested in different forms of poetry. All in all this was a wonderful book comprised of amazing work!

Another Gem from our Nation's Leading Poet
I read a lot and a lot of different genres.There are times I walk into a bookstore or log onto Amazon.com and tell myself:"Pretend you are someone else.Get something outside you're normal realm of taste."Suddenly, I'm buying jazz or British chamber opera, a novel by Someset Maugham, a Britney Spears compilation, a Luchino Visconti film about the Nazis etc.

I've read or skimmed quite a few novels and books of poetry old and new.J. D. McClatchy, a middle-aged gay New Yorker of Celtic decent, is quite simply writing the best contemporary poetry out there.He's published heavily in the elite "Poetry" magazine and turned out several books of poetry and criticism.He's to poems what Michael Cunningham is to novels:simply the most gifted stylist I've encountered.

His style in "Hazmat" has been compared to Baudelaire because his earthy, gritty, sensual, tribal, blue collar themes are presented in precise classical verse.San Francisco poet Tom Gunn and British poet Anthony Hecht and, for that matter, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe all presented decadent subject matter with with a sterling classical sheen.It's an interesting contrast.

McClatchy writes about relevant subject matter like terrorism, like the men's movement, like aging in our youth culture, etc.He escapes the need to wallow in abstraction and mythology and his poems seem, as poems seldom do, torn from the headlines.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED HAZARDOUS MATERIAL
The jacket tells you that HAZMAT means "hazardous material" and is an abbreviation used on signs at the entrances to long tunnels and suspicious containers. Well, the poems in J.D. McClatchy's HAZMAT are highly hazardous! Do not fear going through that tunnel or opening that lid. Stunning eye-openers and maximum pleasurable reading from beginning to end. Long live, JD! ... Read more

Product Description
"Here, in a precedent-setting collection, are the master singers."—Carol Muske-Dukes

Poetry and music share countless virtues, affecting us in many of the same ways. We respond to their lyricism, move to their rhythms, and anticipate their refrains. In antiquity, the two forms were one and the same, performed together, not as prima donna and accompanist, but as inseparable aspects of a single piece.

The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology celebrates this timeless connection with more than 150 extraordinary poems written with music as their muse. Through them, we experience the power of music to enthrall, evoke, and inspire, whether in opera houses, on road trips, or in the unexpected interior worlds to which music escorts us. The book's nine sections—Listening to Music; Songs and Singing; Performances; Composers; Opera; Jazz and Blues; The Piano and Piano Lessons; Horns, Woodwinds, and Strings; and Music in Nature—include an exceptional array of poets: the most eminent versifiers from today and centuries past, as well as an exciting selection of lesser-known discoveries and rediscoveries.

While the poems in The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology are themselves musical, they are included because they are direct responses to music and the experiences entered into through it. Some are tributes to performers and composers—from Bach to Stravinsky to Coltrane to Callas—while others recreate the magic of live performance. Others still are exquisite renderings of the memorable, often intimate moments that music generates or leads us to relive—an audience of seals drawn in from the sea in Seamus Heaney's "The Singer's House," or a man making peace with his bourgeois roots via Cole Porter in Tony Hoagland's "You're the Top."

Whatever element of music they address, the poems of The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology form a striking arrangement that is bound to resonate with lovers of poetry and music alike.

Contributors to The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology include Fleur Adock, W. H. Auden, Charles Baudelaire, Robert Bly, Louise Bogan, Eavan Boland, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Hayden Carruth, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Jane Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Steven Dobyns, Mark Doty, Jane Flanders, Robert Frost, Louise Glück, Deborah Greger, Donald Justice, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, John Hollander, Ted Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Koch, Richard Howard, Louise Labe, D. H. Lawrence, David Lehman, Philip Levine, Federico García Lorca, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, William Matthews, Phyllis McGinley, Sandra McPherson, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Howard Moss, Lisel Mueller, Howard Nemerov, Pablo Neruda, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, Frank O'Hara, Linda Pastan, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Rumi, Sappho, May Sarton, Grace Schulman, Ann Stanford, John Updike, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Susan Wheeler, James Wright, Kevin Young, Adam Zagajewski, Jan Zwicky, and many others. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The poetry of music
This is a beautiful gift for the musician or the wordsman. It contains some of the most wonderful poetry about music and musicians ever written. This is the third copy I have bought. Recommended highly!

Excellent read, excellent condition
The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology is a well-organized collection of poems about an assortment of musical topics; including instrument families, the listening experience, performance, composers, and music in nature. A wide variety of poets and poetic styles are featured, making the reading of this book diverse and captivating.This item was received in excellent condition and holds a place of honor on the bookshelf.

music !!!
New twist on an old theme: music,composers and poetry. A good mix and a good read. ... Read more

Product Description
Since the publication of Hazmat, a book about the life of the body—short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize—J. D. McClatchy’s poetry has increasingly taken up the life of the soul. Now in verse as quicksilver as it is authoritative, he returns to themes he has touched on before, but from a new or unusual perspective—focusing on the frame rather than the picture, the tear rather than the sorrow.

The title poem captures the nervous energy and aloneness surrounding the figure of Mercury, while the stunning long poem “Sorrow in 1944” tells the tale of the grown child of Madame Butterfly. McClatchy’s impulse is to tell the story after the story, the minor opera in the shadows of a great one that nonetheless tells its own tale of the heart, bearing its own measure of tragedy and hope.

With its emotional range, maturity, and formal elegance, Mercury Dressing is the finest work to date from one of our most significant poets.

Mercury Dressing
To steal a glance and, anxious, see
Him slipping into transparency—
The feathered helmet already in place,
Its shadow fallen across his face
(His hooded sex its counterpart)—
Unsteadies the routines of the heart.
If I reach out and touch his wing,
What harm, what help might he then bring?
But suddenly he disappears,
As so much else has down the years . . .
Until I feel him deep inside
The emptiness, preoccupied.
His nerve electrifies the air.
His message is his being there. ... Read more

Product Description
Tender, beguiling, suffused with feeling and wit, the remarkable plays of Thornton Wilder occupy a unique place in American culture. His most celebrated play, Our Town, has achieved iconic status as an expression of the spirit and pathos of small-town American life; adapted for the movies and the operatic stage, it continues to resonate with audiences responding to its formal elegance, plainspoken poetry, and moving evocation of the inevitability of loss.

Collected Plays & Writings on Theater, the most comprehensive one-volume edition of Wilder's work ever published, takes the measure of his extraordinary career as a dramatist by presenting the complete span of his achievement, beginning with his early expressionist experiments and daring one-act plays such as "The Long Christmas Dinner" and "The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden" (one of Wilder's personal favorites), ranging through the full flowering of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker, and encompassing the intriguing dramatic projects of his later years, such as his adaptation of the ancient story of Alcestis (The Alcestiad) and plays written for dramatic cycles based on the Seven Deadly Sins and the varied ages of an individual's life. Complementing the selection of plays is an illuminating group of essays that captures Wilder's reflections on his plays and contains a revealing epistolary account of the film adaptation of Our Town, as well as evaluations of dramatists such as Sophocles, George Bernard Shaw, and the Austrian satirist Johann Nestroy (whose farce Einen Jux will er sich machen Wilder brilliantly transformed into The Matchmaker).

Collected Plays & Writings on Theater also includes material never before published: scenes from The Emporium, an ambitious unfinished play that, emerging out of Wilder's intense engagement with existentialist philosophy in the postwar years, imagines a Kafkaesque department store whose enigmatic activities are as inscrutable as the mysteries of life itself; and the complete screenplay Wilder wrote for Alfred Hitchcock's film Shadow of a Doubt just before reporting for military service in 1942. Although faithful to the spirit of the film, the screenplay presented here restores Wilder's original dialogue, some of which (to Wilder's dismay) was altered for the movie. A study of family life, youthful illusions, and the desperation of a criminal on the run, the Shadow of a Doubt screenplay is a masterful exhibition of the art of suspense and taut dramatic storytelling, and is an essential part of Wilder's ouevre. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays
Excellent edition of the works of one of America's greatest writers and dramatists. Readable type, good paper, scholarly notes & introductory material.

A must have for anyone who loves Wilder, drama, and American letters
I find the plays of Thornton Wilder to be a refreshing delight.While they have humor, satire, a freedom with the conventions of drama, and a telling use of the ordinary to make a deeper point, they also have scenes of emotional power and depth without ever becoming maudlin.Wilder never needs to make things "real" to make a real point.I can't think of any of his characters that need the psychological torture or a pathos built on a foundation of narcissism or the endless drumbeat of sex as the universal explanation for whatever one wants to conclude about life.Yep, I enjoy what Wilder provides and enjoy it very much.

The play that most people associate with Wilder is "Our Town", but they know it mostly from the 1940 movie.The play is sparer and Emily does not live.I think the play is better because her death makes its point about life more strongly than it does when she pulls through.This wonderful edition from the Library of America has articles by Wilder on the production of the play and a series of letters between Wilder and the producer, Sol Lesser, on the making of the movie version are quite interesting.This volume also has notes by Wilder on some of his other plays and on other theatrical topics.

What most people may not know is that the musical "Hello, Dolly" is based on Wilder's play called "The Matchmaker".The musical paid him sufficient royalties that made him financially secure for the remainder of his life.Wilder had based "The Matchmaker" on earlier works.It has a fairly long tradition because it is such a delightful topic.

The volume opens with a series of very short "plays" that are really literary pieces more meant to be read than produced.These were previously collected in a volume entitled "The Angel That Troubled The Waters".

Then come the longer and performable and even regularly performed one act plays."The Long Christmas Dinner" is probably the best well known.The effect of the time compression of 90 years of Christmases (not every year) is such an interesting effect.The actors age on stage, are born, and die for four generations (a fifth being hinted at).The ordinary language and the way we observe these lives in "fast forward" tell us so much.Quite a fine achievement.

Then come the big plays.Wilder won three Pulitzers.One for his novel, "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" in 1928.Another for "Our Town" in 1938, and then for the strangely wonderful "The Skin of Our Teeth" in 1943."The Skin of Our Teeth" is said to be influenced by "Finnegan's Wake" and Wilder did love that book.It toys nearly every dramatic convention one can think of.The three acts aren't really related except by keeping the central characters.But they are not informed from the other acts.It is full of anachronisms such as mixing 20th Century New Jersey with an ice age.And not only do the characters talk to the audience (a Wilder trademark), they do so out of character as if the actor himself or herself is speaking.But they are playing a role there, too.

The volume also includes a number of Wilder's "uncollected plays" and which are quite enjoyable and valuable.

The book also includes a very informative chronology of Wilder's life and very good notes on the texts.

Strongly recommended for those who love drama and American letters.

A "must" for classic theater shelves
The most comprehensive one-volume edition of dramatist Thornton Wilder's work published to date, Thornton Wilder Collected Plays & Writings on Theater is an 800+ page compendium of plays Wilder wrote throughout his career, essays that reveal Wilder's reflections on his own plays, an epistolary account of the film adaptation of the classic play "Our Town", a chronology, notes, and much more. Of special interest to literati is material that has never before been published: scenes from "The Emporium", an ambitious yet unfinished play that evolved out of Wilder's involvement with existentialist philosophy in his postwar years, as well as the complete screenplay that Wilder wrote for Alfred Hitchcock's movie "Shadow of a Doubt" just prior to reporting for military service in 1942. Like all Library of America editions, Thornton Wilder Collected Plays & Writings on Theater features a sturdy hardcover binding, a compact, relatively lightweight design, and an inset ribbon bookmark. A "must" for classic theater shelves, and recommended for college and public library collections.

Someone from Wisconsin
The master anthologist J D McClatchy does it again with this superb edition of Thornton Wilder's plays and associated writing for the theater.

In the SF Chronicle the other day, a reviewer gave this volume horrible marks, he didn't like one thing about it.He said THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH is labored claptrap, and that was about the nicest thing he said.

I'm here to refute that opinion.To me Wilder is a great god of the theater and the shame is that some of his very best work has rarely or never been staged. Over the past ten years, as the different episodes of his two cycles have been given to us by Gallup and others, it's been one enchanting masterpiece after another!I had no idea how protean his imagination was, nor how everything had to be different from one another.What a shame he didn't finish the 7 ages of man, but the episodes we have, "Infancy," "Childhood," "Youth" and especially the new "The Rivers Under the Earth" are pretty spectacular,And as for THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS, what can I say, I don't believe any other author could have pulled it off."A Ringing of Doorbells" gets sort of into Tennessee Williams country, but Williams lacked the control Wilder had in spades.

OK, I wasn't crazy about "In Shakespeare and the Bible," but I probably just don't understand it.I can't decide if Katy did the right thing, nor what the point was about her having changed her name from Mildred, nor what agreement is made by the other two more worldly characters, her fiancee and her aunt, after Katy makes her exit. "Bernice" and "The Wreck on the Five Twenty Five" are beyond praise and I wish I could step into a time machine and see Ethel Waters and Lillian Gish act in them in Berlin or wherever their fugitive premiere was.We don't usually think of Wilder as being interested in civil rights, and the famous plays we know by him deal with almost totally white worlds, but "Bernice" is all about a sort of Frantz Fanon liberation and empowerment after enslavement, just brilliant.

And the two "extra" (non cycle) plays are cute too, "The Marriage we Deplore" has a surprise ending, and "The Unerring Instinct" has a device I think John Waters would love -- or has he used it already?

The EMPORIUM grows in power and eerie knowledge every time I read more of it.Someday I hope to read the manuscripts for the whole thing, no matter how chaotic they are.

For many the great plus of this McClatchy-edited volume will be the screenplay for SHADOW OF A DOUBT.It is remarkable how much of it Hitchcock used!And yet while the editorial apparatus tut tuts the contributions made to the screenplay by NEW YORKER hack Sally Benson, I think she helped.She wasn't the carpetbagger some have made her out to be. Her writing is always good, and a thorough study of her work on the final screenplay of SHADOW OF A DOUBT must be undertaken at once.Is Benson still alive?Somebody must know.In the meantime we have this fantastic book will console us. ... Read more

Product Description
Ten Commandments is a book-length sequence of poems that plot the rules we were raised on, rules we forget but can't evade. Here is the whole underworld of desire, its tasks and perversions. Here are the iron laws and the way the heart is shaped by them, even as it prefers betrayal, adultery, murder, or greed. J. D. McClatchy draws on intimate authobiographical details, and on a range of historical incidents that includes an eerie account of Proust in a brothel and a chilling glimpse of Eichmann in Argentina. Sideshow freaks, snipers in Vietnam, Auden's dictionary, whirling dervishes, motel and mammogram, slave and saint--this book is a cabinet of moral curiosities, a collage of emotional astonishments.

When McClatchy's previous book, The Rest of the Way, was published in 1990, he was given an Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, whose citation concluded, "it may be that no more eloquent poet will emerge in his American generation."

With Ten Commandments, there can be no question of his mastery. Here is that rare eloquence indeed, charged with passion and raised to a remarkable new power. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A book of conceits and confessions, most interesting
First, I want to mention how I stumbled on this book. With luck I did stumble on it, too. I was searching for poetry about The Ten Commandments. This is a book that is like a series of confessions and conceits, a book about living life and the failings that we even good people have when it comes to the yardstick of The Ten Commandments.

A lively hardback, to my surprise the book arrived with a charming art-like dustcover, in hardbook, on good paper and well layed out all for a song. Remember, I'd not heard a word of this book of poetry before finding it. Now I am a fan of J.D. McClatchy, for anyone who can capture and poetically state a tenor of lives caught in living, and wrought with a poet's sense is someone well worth the time to consider. I suppose I am raising my very modest voice to a host of others, but mostly I am saying this is probably an overlooked book because it says "Ten Commandments."

Take Adultery:
"Out beyond your head, slumped now over your breasts, the
horizon's
Hit on the day's first mirage--lolling palms, a milky water
hole,..."

No other God:
"Week after week I've had to wwatch
the old needle tracks and the new habits--
aerobics, twelve-step meetings, the soup kitchen--
so where you used to speak in tongues,
now it's a day-glo bumper stickers,
meaning given way to motto."...

So what if you're religious and looking for something theological? Maybe this isn't on the ordinary or extra-ordinary reading list? Maybe it should be. I think so. It's also a kind of entertaining book. One should not say "kind of" but here it fits because like good poetry this entertains, but it also brings the world a little larger and through its use of words and ideas widens the spectrum for this reader. I recommend this book to people interested in learning about our American world in a sophisticated rendition of modern, free verse poems on The Ten Commandments. I came across it by surprise, and you, too will find it worth the time to read and a prize--I hope, as did I. You can see I liked this book of poems.

--Peter Menkin, Mill Valley, CA USA

The Original Ten
Oh boy. I'd stick with the original ten in the Bible. True, there have been recidivists in opposite direction, but no defense of the tenth commandment will prevail against the lack of inhibition of our elected leaders. There is a moral void at the center, and no poems can overcome kitsch and Krugerrands, not to mention a sensibility too timid to encounter the self in a mirror with anything but an ultra-refinement of conceited verse that won't work in a rough and tumble age...

A fine book for regular readers of contemporary poetry
Fine, fine poems. DefinitelyNOT cheap, vulgar, mean-spirited ordisgusting, as another reader found them.And not a tract on the tencommandments in any hyper-religious sense (not a theological book,obviously).

amazing
this is a book of poetry that should get people reading poetry again. not only is it miles above any book of poetry published in recent memory, i am sure i will not read anything that will surpass it in the near future. ten commandments is a book that will burn your fingers as you turn the pages. the year's best book of poetry is an understatement. ... Read more

Product Description
What are poets looking at, looking for, when they walk into a room of pictures? Poets on Painters attempts to answer this question by bringing together, for the first time, essays by modern American and British poets about painting. The poets bring to their task a fresh eye and a freshened language, vivid with nuance and color and force. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Insightful work
This book is a must for anyone interested in the relationship between painting, poetry and literature. ... Read more

Product Description
Each audio production is accompanied by a book containing the texts of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.

John Ashbery (1927) was born in Rochester, New York.He has published 19 books of poetry including Girls on the Run: A Poem (1999); Wakefulness (1998); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); A Wave (1984) which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.Ashbery was the first English-language poet to win the Grand Prix de Biennales Internationales de Poésie (Brussels), and has also received the National Book Award, The Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Fulbright Foundation.He is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages at Bard College.He divides his time between New York City and Hudson, New York. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great Selections
I have listened to these recordings until the actually tape gave out. The selections are Ashbery's most approachable and possibly best poems one can read. He reads in a relatively fast pace, and a touch on the flat side, but I mean that in a good way. He doesn't make his poetry sound precious or grand like a Stevens or Eliot. When this makes it to cd I will buy it again.

Great! But Why Only on Cassette?
This recording features Ashbery reading sixteen poems--some very short, some rather long--in order of their publication. Side one consists of "Soonest Mended," "Parergon," and "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (yes, the whole poem!). Side two consists of "Pyrography," "Daffy Duck in Hollywood," "Wet Casements," "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name," "My Erotic Double," "At North Farm," "More Pleasant Adventures," "Around the Rough and Rugged Rocks the Ragged Rascal Rudely Ran," "This Room," "Memories of Imperialism," "Redeemed Area," "Your Name Here," and "The Underwriters." One could wish for greater balance: there are no poems here from Ashbery's first books (those published in the '50s and '60s), and the last five poems are all from his latest book, YOUR NAME HERE. All sixteen are interesting poems, however. Unlike most of the writers in this series, Ashbery is alive; presumably he was allowed to choose which poems would be included, and one expects any writer to favor his most recent work.

The tape comes with a 63pp. book that includes the texts of the poems, excerpts from interviews, and an informative introduction by J.D. McClatchy. The back jacket reproduces the typescript of "Your Name Here."

Ashbery's reading is clear and unrushed. It is also relatively uninflected: he lets the words speak for themselves, rather than turn his readings into theatrical performances.

My only real complaint is that Random House has released this (along with the rest of this series) only on cassette. Compact discs would last longer, and they would also allow listeners to punch up individual poems instantly, without having to guess at rewinding and fast-forwarding. They'd certainly be more useful to teachers. ... Read more

Product Description
Read by the Poet
One Cassette, 1 hour

The second installment of our exclusive The Voice of the Poet series, comprised of rare archival recordings, some never before released, featuring Robert Lowell.

This audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text to the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great package of tape & texts & introductory essay
This series, the Voice of the Poet, offers not just great tapes--there are lots of sources for poetry tapes out there--but the best tapes in the best context.This package offers a fantastic selection of Lowell's poems, readby Lowell in very high-quality recordings.The texts for all the poems hereads are provided in an elegant booklet that sits in a convenient pocketin the tape-case, and J.D. McClatchy provides an extremely useful,thoughtful introduction to Lowell's poetry.I'm very happy to have it formyself, but I think it would would be perfect for students as well. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fabulous!
Should have at least been nominated for the Pulitzer, but forces of envy have conspired against this young, beautifully developed poet. His verbal thrusts shake my every epidermic pore. His tongue on my testimonies celebrates life itself. Highly Recommended ... Read more

Product Description
The ceremony itself is just two words: “I do.” But lots more has been written about the anticipation, the event, and the aftermath, and The Voices of Marriage gathers the best poems ever written on this most extraordinary moment—at once the most private and the most public—in a person’s life. From Shakespeare to our own day, here are poets whose lines sparkle with wit, or hush with mystery.

The CD is packaged with a perfect-bound book containing the text of all the poems and feature an introduction by J.D. McClatchy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Voices of Love / Voices of Marriage
These are two charming eclectic collections of love poetry, on CD with accompanying books, which really ought to be purchased and reviewed together. The 10 actors, all talented, also present a varied lot. Each poem and each performance was enjoyable, some romantic, some funny, some thoughtful, some sad, ranging from modern to one written in the 3rd Century and all in between. Many of the poems were a surprise and the very fact of their inclusion was enchanting, for instance Simon Prebble's charming rendition of The Owl and the Pussycat, a poem whose acquaintance I made 50 years ago and which remains dear to me, on the Voices of Marriage CD. I reacted differently to each poem, to each actor, and to each performance and would assume that most listeners would also have highly personal reactions. There were many poems I was especially delighted to hear, as they were old favorites, others because they were newly met ones. There were two actors I found irresistible, whose every performance was wonderful: Simon Prebble, long a favorite, and Michael Wager, new to me. Most of the others were also superb. There were some who were decidedly less entrancing, however each actor did at least one poem no one else could have done better and every poem can be enjoyed as it was performed, on its own merits. The more I listen, the more I find to enjoy, even including the order in which the poems are presented.In all, this is a wonderful idea. ... Read more