By
Paul-Newell Reaves, on April 25th, 2011
[Deserted Isle Books is our new series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]
The voice of things.
My copy of The Voice of Things, by French prose poet Francis Ponge, is well worn― split in the spine on page 32, my favorite pages turned down in the top corner. Though he ran in the 1920′s surrealist circles of Breton and Giacometti, literary recognition came late in Ponge’s career, and The Voice of Things was not published until 1942.
Ponge takes objects and describes them― lyrically, fancifully, but mainly simply and directly. Rain, the candle, the oyster, all become the subjects of his prose poems. In “The Pleasures of Doors,” he notes that kings never experience the joy of pulling a handle gently until the latch clicks. …
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By
Paul-Newell Reaves, on January 26th, 2011
[This book of poetry is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Derek Walcott
2010, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
Filed Under: Poetry
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Aging, tranquility, the death of friends and the cyclical nature of time are a few of the themes touched upon in Derek Walcott’s White Egrets. He finds beauty in the flight of birds, the crumbling of buildings, in broken dialects, and always in the sea.
Water and the sea feature in almost all of the 54 poems, as Walcott’s verses traverse the world–from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, to Spain’s Mediterranean and Italy’s Adriatic, from the Congo river, to the canals of Amsterdam. Rain and the sea, rivers, marshes, wells, waterfalls–water is the central motif, expressing the flow of time, the seasons, the rain cycle, and the recurrent struggles of man, as generation after generation loves and dies. …
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