Edward LuedersRezensionen

With the rather faint hope that I would be able to educate myself by reading the books listed, I purchased it, probably in about 1959...while still at school. I remember my teacher for English Honours (who wasn't putting too much effort into teaching me ......one of his two honours students).....that you couldn't expect to get much real literature under your belt until you were in your 40's. And I think he was right though it was pretty discouraging at the time. I've just taken the trouble to have a glance through this list and see how many of the books I have read at this stage of my life. So, of the British fiction I've read 16 out of the 32 recommended; 8 out of 44 of the American fiction recommended; 18 out of the 45 of international fiction. So, not great but not too bad, I guess, seeing that I'm not a great reader of fiction. But I thought I would score better on the non-fiction...say on sculpture. But no. I've maybe read one of the 12 listed.But I think the issue is that the books have actually dated. I've read more modern books (with better colour plates etc.....maybe better text maybe not) on most of the subject listed but just not those picked out by the selection panel here. Though it illustrates the futility of trying to be prescriptive about what others should be reading. Inevitably, the list says more about those doing the selection than about what is really great. However, one should give some credit to a panel of this nature that draws on various experts in their fields ....but all from the USA...so one must expect some bias. I've kept this now for about 60 years and it hasn't really guided my reading. And, of course, it's only about literature and the fine arts...it says nothing about mathematics, or cosmology, or chemistry or genetics or any of the other subjects that have heavily occupied my reading over the years.
So I think I will either pass it on to charity or it might have to be binned as it's now so out of date. But OK as far as it goes. Three stars from me.

I know I read this long ago, as it was popular among early "back-to-the-landers", but couldn't remember anything about it when I came across it in a donation box. Reading it again, I was not enticed. It reminded me too much of a long ago philosophy course (unfortuantely, this was remembered) which wanted us to contemplate "what is real?" and "how do I know what I know." The hermit author should have spent more time just walking in those woods and splitting wood..½

This is a book I suddenly recalled, in Dec or 2020. I must have read it read in the 1990s or so. This is where I first came across William Carlos William's "This is Just to Say," which remains a favorite work. I think this anthology is still popular with high school English teachers, but it is also the right kind of book for poetry lovers like me.

Thought I'd read it as a child (I think I skimmed it), read it again just now. It's okay, but not really my thing. I prefer light verse (Ogden Nash, A.A. Milne--I've read When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six numerous times, and they never lose their joy for me).

The kind of poetry featured in Reflections is the thoughtful, high-faluting kind, with much reliance on things as metaphors for other things. That said, I did remember the title (a shortened version of a title of the final poem), hazily, from childhood until now.

If you like poetry, this is probably an excellent collection. If, like me, you only like it when it's relatively silly & clever at the same time (hard to do!) this may not be for you.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).

I first encountered this book only a few short years ago and immediately fell in love with it. Sometimes complexity of thought can be conveyed in very simple language. (For example, Summons by Robert Francis, page 54.) For me, the simplest things are usually the best. You might also enjoy its companion work, "Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle," one of my very favorite anthologies. What a diverse and wonderful selection of poems! (I loved The Stone by Paul Blackburn, page 24, especially.)

A good introduction for kids/teens to poetry. I'm not sure how this could hold an adult's interest--unless the person first encountered it as a child. The book is visually appealing and does cover a variety of styles.

Margaret Hawkins, author of The Year of Cats and Dogs and How to Survive a Natural Disaster, told me I have to read this book. And who am I to argue with a writer I admire so much? Not surprisingly, she was right.

This short novel/poetry/philosophy/meditation volume has a quirkiness all its own. The author/narrator is a college professor who spends his summers in his cabin on Clam lake in Northern Wisconsin. He arrives one year to find his food depleted, his bed slept in, and a letter from a mysterious stranger who has spent the winter writing and meditating on language, literature, life, and the flora and fauna in his snowbound cabin.

I have often fantasized about such a hiatus from the world. The silence pervades the pages, and I could not hear the stranger’s voice. Some of his musings are serious and some comic, but all have an air of a man seriously grappling with the large and small details of life.

The stranger is most concerned with metaphors, and he reduces much of human existence to the wide variety of ways we use metaphor. I am not sure I bought into this idea entirely, but it certainly is intriguing.

I will nominate The Clam Lakes Papers for candidacy on my “Desert Island Shelf.” It certainly needs another read after I have thought about it a little more. The author has penned a restful, relaxing, serene story, and Lueders has revived my fantasy of a getaway vacation without cell phones, radios, TVs – only paper, pencils, books, and a supply of food. 5 stars

--Jim, 12/29/10

This collection of poetry is one of the best I've encountered for young readers. The volume features poetry from poets both well-known and somewhat obscure, and offers a range of perspectives on a number of different subjects. Each of the twenty-one sections gathers poems focusing on a specific theme, ranging from family to sports to poetry itself. When read together, the poems in each of the sections provide several engaging voices and a sampling of intriguing poetic technique.

Given that this is a collection intended for younger readers, I was delighted to find that the poems increase in complexity -- both in poetic structure and in subject matter -- as the book progresses. The earlier poems are quite simple and straightforward, while poems toward the end are far more complex and challenging. In this sense, it is a teaching volume. Even thought it is not annotated and offers no suggestions for critiques or analysis, the progression of complexity challenges the reader to read more critically.

This is the collection's second edition, and it has been updated to include both greater diversity and more contemporary poetry. Having not read the first edition, I can't make any appropriate comparison, except to say that some of the selections seem a bit outdated (there's still a lot of "revolutionary" poetry from the 1970s), and it seems that there's a heavy weighting toward Latino poetry. Perhaps the editors were simply focusing on poetry from the predominant minorities in the U.S., but it seems odd to me that "diversity" is inclusion of more Latino and Asian-American poets, with little attention to poets the rest of the world over.

That said, the collection has many merits, not least of which is an apt compilation of poetry for younger readers that includes both classic favorites and some lesser-known poems. Recommended for ages seven and up.

I had this slim volume as a child. Probably bought at a Scholastic book fair. Found recently at Half Price Books in hardcover...had to by it. Some interesting and accessible poems for young people in one collection. Photographs illustrate this edition. The title teased my family so much that eventually my mom even found a recipe for watermelon pickles and made them one summer. The poems are better than the pickles.

The edited record of four public dialogs held in 1988 between eminent writers in the fields of natural history.

The book that started it all for me writing poetry!!!

This is one of three books that I own that I have literally read to pieces. It's held together with rubber bands and audibly creeks when I open it. There isn't a single poem in the collection that hasn't stood the test of three generations reading, and loving, them. I guess I'll need to buy a new copy so that my children can eventually read it too.

Years ago, when I was teaching English to eighth-graders, there was no good poetry anthology to engage their interest. Toward the end of the year, my students and I decided to remedy that situation, at least for ourselves. They browsed in all the poetry in our small school library and in a number of books of contemporary poetry I brought to their attention. That first class came up with their own selections (some they wrote themselves, most they found in their browsing). They called their anthology "Attempts at a Purple Aardvark." I never knew exactly how they came up with that title, but partly it had to do with the fact that our anthology was "published" on the school ditto machine. Some of you of a certain age will remember well that smelly purple ink; you can't forget it.

Of course, my students (as sophisticated as they liked to think they were) gravitated to some of the old favorites: "Casey at the Bat," "The Cremation of Sam McGee," you know the sort. But they also found brief modern lyrics appealing when they could find them: brief poems, off-beat topics, free forms, and a little surprise for the reader. I knew that publishers were missing a ready-made readership in not producing anthologies of such poems for preteens.

Apparently, the late Stephen Dunning (who had also been a junior-high teacher) and some of his colleagues had had the same experience. In 1967 they came out with an anthology that hit the mark four-square. "Over half the poems in the book are those that students chose...." All of the poems are modern ones; none of the are the old ta-dum-ta-dum-ta-dum favorites. Their title rivaled our purple aardvark: Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle . . . and other modern verse.

I think their anthology may have originally been intended as a supplementary textbook; it even had two or three discussion questions on each poem collected at the back of the book. But their selection of poems, the design of the book, and the appealing arrangement of the poems made it just too attractive to be considered a textbook. Almost immediately it was published in a trade edition (and it probably is still in print). The title of the anthology, of course, was taken from a poem by John Tobias, "Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity." But the tone of the book, and the real significance of the title, were evoked in the first poem you read when you open the text: Eve Merriam's "How to Eat a Poem."

Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.

Unfortunately later editions did not retain the clever design of the original. The cover of the book was a bright green, like the rind of a watermelon. The end papers were a bright red, like the juicy fruit. And words inside printed in black--why they were the seeds, of course.

The poems are arranged in groups, but with none of that editorial paraphernalia students despise--and ignore. No headnotes, footnotes, sidenotes. No vocabulary words, rhyme schemes, writing assignments. Not even editor's titles for their groupings of poems: just Section One, Two, etc. But the topics become obvious, and they appeal to pre-teenagers. Section Four, for example, has these little poems: "Steam Shovel," "The Toaster," "On Watching the Construction of a Skyscraper," "Apartment House," and "The Builders." The last one, by Sarah Henderson Hay, is a take-off on the three little pigs: "I told them a thousand times if I told them once: / Stop fooling around, I said, with straw and sticks.... Brick is the stuff to build with, solid bricks."

The poems are placed neatly on the page, with plenty of white space, usually only one poem per page. Along with the poems, the book is also a collection of neat black and white photographs--sometimes related to the topics of the poems, but not mere illustrations by any means.

All the poems are simple, accessible to young readers, but most of them have just a slight twist, an idea that makes readers say "aha" or dares them to read the poem just one more time. Some of the titles alone give you a sense that the poems would have the appeal of "a purple aardvark": "Sonic Boom," "The Base Stealer," "A Coney Island Life," "Mother's Biscuits," "Wild Goose" . . . . The list could go on and on.

But ya jus gotta read Edwin Hoey's "Foul Shot" on p. 112. "With two 60's stuck on the scoreboard / And two seconds hanging ont he clock . . . ."

Now there are a multitude of wonderful poetry anthologies designed for young readers. Paul Janeczko (q.v.), for example, has edited a dozen or more. And Billy Collins, when he was US Poet Laureate, produced Poetry 180 : A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Each volume was originally intended for reading aloud, without teachers' comments, on high-school intercoms.

But Watermelon Pickle set the pace. Don't miss it. Scholastic has also published it in paperback, but a collector will really want the original "watermelon."

Only the best introduction to poetry (and photography) for young people ever. Please see page 35, and read Theodore Roethke's "The Bat"

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

A wonderful collection of poems, one of which is Paul Blackburn's "The Stone," which I loved instantly.

This eclectic collection of modern poems is organized into 15 sections of loosely related works. A black and white photo hinting at the topic precedes each section. Some of the topics covered include cats, science and sense of place. Many poets are represented, from children's poets like Eve Merriam and Maxine Kumin to adult poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Although most of the poems are short and unrhymed, they express a wide variety of moods and should appeal to older children, teens and adults. 1994 (orig. 1966), Scholastic, $18.00. Ages 10 up.
Gisela Jernigan, Ph.D. (Children's Literature)

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