Melody Murray's Books

This new edition is considerably larger than the previous ones, and I've been working on it for a month or so. I discovered some new poets, some old friends, and faithfully slogged through some poems I remembered hating. I was right about them, but one never knows. Poetry, I've found, is very fluid, and poems resonate differently for me through the years. There's no way I feel adequate to review a book on this scale, a book of this scope, except to say that if you like poetry it's certainly worth perusing. If you hate poetry, read the quote by William Matthews below, and be free.The poems new to me with which I fell in love:Amaze by Adelaide CrapseyThe House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm by Wallace StevensBefore Disaster by Yvor WintersThose Winter Sundays by Robert HaydenThe Lost Children by Randall Jarrell Why Regret by Galway KinnellThe Return by Philip LevineAt 65 by Richard HowardForty Something by Robert HassCelestial Music andVespers by Louise GluckOtherwise by Jane KenyonForm by Heather McHughAnd last, this gem from the blurb about William Matthews"He once observed that most published poems fall into one of four thematic categories: '1. I went out in the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious. 2. We're not getting any younger. 3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey. 4) Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent and on we know not what.'"