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1 Local Warehouse Anthologies- Poetry

Poem a Day #01: Poem a Day: Volume One

by Karen Mccosker

Poem a Day #01: Poem a Day: Volume One Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

ONCE UPON A TIME men and women of sense and sensibility knew by heart dozens of poems - Shakespeare's sonnets, stirring patriotic verse, odes to churchyards and elegies for the departed, the music of Swinburne or Poe or Yeats. Poems are meant to be voiced and A Poem a Day includes 366 poems old and new - one for each day of the year - worth learning by heart. Only two criteria were demanded of each poem for inclusion in this collection - it had to be short enough to learn in a day, and good enough to stand among the great poetry of the English language, from Chaucer to Sylvia Plath.

A Poem a Day is a book for the bedside. It contains many of the most familiar poems in the language and others that will come as a surprise. Most are complete and most are short, easily contained in a single page. But a few are substantial works, like Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and Rudyard Kipling's "Gunga Din." Some have been read by every high school student (Andrew Marvel, "To His Coy Mistress") while others will be new to most readers (Thomas Hardy, "The Voice"). But all share the compression and charged meaning which are the soul of poetry.

In its British version the book went through seven printings in a year and was a bestseller. Now Karen McCosker has added a new foreword and fifty new poems for an American audience willing to make poetry a part of life.

Synopsis:

In times past, Americans with a love of poetry routinely learned by heart dozens of poems - Shakespeare's sonnets, stirring patriotic verse, odes to churchyards and elegies for the departed, the wit of Dorothy Parker and the music of Swinburne or Poe or Yeats. A Poem a Day includes 366 poems old and new, one for each day of the year, worth learning by heart. All share two things in common - they are short enough to learn in a day, and good enough to stand with the great poetry of the language, from Chaucer to Sylvia Plath. On most pages readers will also find brief, often amusing, always interesting trivia about the poets and their poems.

About the Author

KAREN McCOSKER is a poet who lives in Maine and teaches at the University of Maine at Presque Isle.

NICHOLAS ALBERY is the founder of the Institute for Social Inventions and lives in London.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
Michelle L S, February 19, 2009 (view all comments by Michelle L S)
It's hard to create a poetry anthology without getting preachy about it, like "these are THE poems of our era." A Poem a Day manages to present a whole treasure trove of classics both known and unknown, and yet the editors stay out of the way, giving the reader the delightful impression s/he is discovering great poems for herself (or himself).

The poems are accessible to those new to poetry but the editors include weightier pieces too, like Gertrude's Prayer by Rudyard Kipling and plenty of Gerard Manely Hopkins. Pithy comments at the bottom of each day's page never tell the reader how to interpret a poem -- instead they include intimate details, like Wendy Cope's own comment on her poem "Giving up Smoking" (something to the effect that people who've never smoked don't understand what an intense love poem it is).

This is hands down my favorite anthology -- we're on our second yearly read-through, and we intend to continue the tradition for decades to come.

-Shelley Schoepflin Sanders
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Product Details

ISBN:
9781883642389
Subtitle:
Volume One
Editor:
McCosker, Karen
Editor:
McCosker, Karen
Editor:
Albery, Nicholas
Author:
McCosker, Karen
Editor:
Albery, Nicholas
Publisher:
Zoland Books
Location:
South Royalton, Vt. :
Subject:
Anthologies (multiple authors)
Subject:
American poetry
Subject:
Poetry
Subject:
Collections
Subject:
English poetry
Copyright:
Edition Number:
American ed.
Edition Description:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Series:
Poem a Day
Series Volume:
013-00
Publication Date:
June 1998
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
496
Dimensions:
9.03x5.99x1.52 in. 1.56 lbs.

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