Lavender's Blue: A Book of Nursery Rhymes

Book Description

A definitive collection of nursery rhymes, beautifully designed and illustrated by the influential artist Harold Jones. This facsimile has been lovingly produced to recreate the look and feel of the first editions of this much-loved book.

Customer Reviews:

A wonderful book!.......2007-01-25

My children, ages 22 and 18, grew up on this book, and I'm pleased to see it's still being published. It has all of the old nursery rhymes in it and delightful pictures. It has some finger plays as well. I will keep buying this for gifts!

Positively delightful!.......2006-06-03

What a wonderful book! The illustrations are charming, and the rhymes included practically constitute an exercise in cultural literacy. My 5yo daughter LOVES this book, and read the whole thing in two days as soon as I brought it home. She still pours over it.

A lovely addition to your family's library, particularly if you have young children! (and I am VERY picky!)

Average customer rating:

Great teaching book
When a Line Bends...A Shape Begins
What Can a Line Do?
Review from ultra

When a Line Bends . . . A Shape Begins
Rhonda Gowler Greene , and Rhonda Gowler Greene
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0618152415

Book Description

A line is thin. A line is narrowcurved like a worm, straight as an arrow. Squares, circles, triangles, and many more shapes abound in this lively book. With jaunty, rhyming text, young readers are invited to find different shapes on each busy, vibrant page. Once you start looking, you won't be able to stop! The perfect book for little ones beginning to distinguish shapes.

Customer Reviews:

Great teaching book.......2007-08-12

As a preschool teacher, this book is wonderful for learning to see shapes in the world we live in. My children loved it.

When a Line Bends...A Shape Begins.......2006-04-07

I teach 3rd grade and purchased this book to introduce geometry. It really seems to interest the students. I had originally borrowed the book from a friend who teaches Learning Support, and she found it to be useful for introducing geometry.

What Can a Line Do? .......2004-11-11

It can do many things, including creating great shapes. Take the adventure via this book, then try it yourself.

Review from ultra.......1998-12-14

In an industy where hundreds of childrens books are introduced almost every month, this one impressively stands out among all the other casualties for content and especially illustration. This is a rare case where illustration style and story does not try to partonize parents and their children nor does it come across as an over-intellectualized wanna-be childrens book. I can't wait to have children so I can read and reread this book to them.

sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way: New Poems

Average customer rating:

So you want to be a writer
What Do Expect, The Guy Is Dead
Not his best, but still readable.
please be more careful with the man
Getting the Hang of Being Dead?

sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way: New Poems
Charles Bukowski
Manufacturer: Ecco
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0060568232
Release Date: 2004-01-06

Book Description

from "neither Shakespeare nor Mickey Spillane"

young young young, only wanting the Word,
going mad in the streets and in the bars,
brutal fights, broken glass, crazy women
screaming in
your cheap room,
you a familiar guest at the drunk tank, North
Avenue 21, Lincoln Heights

sifting through the madness for the Word, the
line
the way,
hoping for a check from somewhere,
dreaming of a letter from a great editor:
"Chinaski, you don't know how long we've been waiting for you!"

no chance at all.

Customer Reviews:

So you want to be a writer.......2007-04-26

There's a poem in this book called, So you Want to be a writer, and I think it should be read before anyone decides to call themselves a writer. Then they should look in the mirror, and ask themselves whether or not they're a fony. If they can answer that question "no, I'm not a fony," Then they should never attempt to write another word, because if they did everything that I just said they should do, then they were never a writer in the first place.

The consensus is the there is some good and some bad in this book, I own it, have read it and am inclined to agree.

What Do Expect, The Guy Is Dead.......2005-01-27

If you're a Bukowski fan, you can't get enough. Just read it, it can't hurt except your pocket book, and if you're that skeptical go to the library.
Is that one says about a great artist/author's work after they're dead? It's redundant and mediocre?
It's just like when you like certain music and end-up collecting compilations. This book contains a lot of the old, but some new material and Bukowski carries on from the dead.
By all means you should read his earlier works, but all is good too.

Not his best, but still readable........2004-07-26

Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way (Ecco, 2003)

Yet another collection of posthumously-published work from the ten thousand pages Buk left after his death, Sifting... is an inconsistent piece of work at best, like most of Buk's later collections of poetry. Every once in a while you get a great snatch of writing like the one that became the title of the collection, but it's mostly just the same old Buk, chopping up witty observations into line that look like poetry. That said, Buk was better than most at the chopping itself; he had an innate sense of what was really important in a piece, however vague it might be, and accenting it with the size and shape of the poem itself, making his prose-chopped-up-into-lines more readable than the vast majority of same.

The best thing about Sifting... is that it contains a lot more of the gems among the dross than many of Buk's later collections. You'll find yourself nodding and smiling every two or three pages here; not as much as in his best stuff (Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame remains the height of Bukowski's poetic achievement), but a lot more than in some of the recent books.

Worth it for Bukowski fans. Others might want to start wth Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, War All the Time, or one of the other "best-of" collections from the early and middle periods. *** ½

please be more careful with the man.......2003-05-24

To make it short: this is not Bukowski's best work. And it doesn't have to be. He published over 40 books when he was still alive and all that is released now after his death are the Left-overs. Some are stronger, some are weaker, but one thing is clear: with collections like this one you might scare off future readers because what can be found in this collection is less than average in quality for Bukowski. If you want to go ahead and discover Bukowski (and I strongly recommend that), buy one of his earlier books of poetry like: Burning in water, drowning in flame OR Dangling in the Tournefortia. This is where you find some of the best poems ever written in English. This new book is o.k., but at least wait until it comes out in Paperback...

Getting the Hang of Being Dead?.......2003-05-02

Much better stuff than previous posthumous publications. Buk may eventually surpass Hemingway for more books published dead than alive.

Between the Lines: A History of Poetry in Letters, 1962-2002

Average customer rating:

Life is fiction in disguise--James Merrill
Makes for fascinating reading.

Between the Lines: A History of Poetry in Letters, 1962-2002
Joseph Parisi , and Stephen Young
Manufacturer: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1566636566

Book Description

Continuing the saga begun in Dear Editor, the former editor and senior editor of Poetry magazine tell the story of the last half-century of the magazine's leadership in the publication of American poetry through correspondence with a myriad of poets. An enlightening, amusing, and revealing book.

Customer Reviews:

Life is fiction in disguise--James Merrill.......2006-12-05

This book shares the fascinating story behind the more than $100 million bequest to Poetry magazine by amateur poet and pharmaceutical heiress, Ruth Lilly. Included are numerous illustrations--author photographs, drawings, and newspaper clippings to enliven this amazing story. Nearly five hundred letters from poets are featured in the book--a "who's who" from T.S. Eliot, Erica Jong, and Rita Dove to Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky, and Mary Oliver. This story makes for compelling reading as well as provides business lessons for how to treat people with kindness and compassion.

Makes for fascinating reading........2006-10-15

In 2002 The Chicago Tribune broke the news that Poetry Magazine had received more than a mullion from an amateur poet and heiress: the story of this gift and its impact is detailed in BETWEEN THE LINES: A HISTORY OF POETRY IN LETTERS, 1962-2002. This follows the editors' prior DEAD EDITOR in 2002, which detailed Poetry's first fifty years through its correspondence with its poets: BETWEEN THE LINES continues the story through one of the biggest impacts in the genre's history, and makes for fascinating reading.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

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Needed: one Update
essays by a poet breaking down arbitrary walls and mistaken assumptions

Line Break: Poetry As Social Practice
James Scully
Manufacturer: Curbstone Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1931896186

Book Description

Line Break is the major work on poetry as social practice and a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary criticism or poetry. For many years, James Scully, along with others, quietly radicalized American poetry -in theory and in practice, in how it is lived as well as in how it is written. In eight provocative essays, James Scully argues provocatively for artistic and cultural practice that actively opposes structures of power too often reinforced by intellectual activities.

"James Scully's essays, like his poems, refuse to soothe or simplify, to shortchange either poetry or the imperative for social revolution. His fiercely demystifying intelligence is grounded in hope and realism for poetry in itself along with other forms of dissident engagement."-Adrienne Rich

"Scully's brilliance is mesmerizing, radicalizing, a power plant producing synapses in the 'mind politic' that may well allow Americans, finally, to write and discourse with our kind around the globe. If American poets have a role to play in preserving free speech in the 21st century, this book belongs in our every backpack."-Linda McCarriston

Customer Reviews:

Needed: one Update.......2006-07-04

If they're going to be reprinting this book, why not ask the author to update it a little. In "Taking Poetry Seriously," Scully addresses this issue only to dismiss it with the other hand, even as he admits that "Geopolitically and technologically, much has changed since these essays were written some 15-20 years ago. Upheavals on virtually every level have only made the aesthetic question less discrete, more implicated in just about everything, than it ever was supposed to be." And yet he does nothing about it, just releases the same eight essays which, if you're reading them through, all share the same dated air, some of them so dated as to be worthless for readers of the 21st century.

Well, you're never going to convince me that Roque Dalton was the great poet of modernism anyhow. But as you can see in the sentences quoted above, Scully's prose is often an imprecise arena where accidents occur. Could anything be more vague than his use of "just about everything" above? Or, when was there a time when the "aesthetic question" was ever less than fully implicated, even if in a "noblesse oblige" way, in questions of social justice?

Scully's influence is vast and it is owing to him, I think, that we have seen a gradual lessening of the "privilege of individual experience" around which so much of our lyric poetry was written. And yet it's all the sadder that he couldn't bestir himself to update his remarks, incidental and otherwise, on Cuba, Iraq, the geosphere, postcolonial implications of post-impressionism in art and writing, and the technological wonderland of the internet. Needed: one update.

essays by a poet breaking down arbitrary walls and mistaken assumptions.......2005-08-03

Scully says that in the eight essays he means to question the "fetishes we find ourselves wearing like ankle bracelets...that enable cultural overseers to shut us up in a kind of house arrest." Adrienne Rich remarks in her "Foreword" on this poet's "fiercely demystifying intelligence." Yes, Scully fiercely, uncompromisingly, brings his hopes for a truly, thoroughly humane world into the light. Such hopes are often preceded by trenchant, riveting critiques on writings, ideas, and states of affairs; and sometimes the hopes are bound in with these in a struggle. Such struggling especially is the sign that besides having a cogent moral sense and articulated vision, Scully is a consummate realist. He does not abandon common, inevitable life for promises, visions, or programs of a heavenly life. What he surely does bring to light is the true notion that "ankle bracelets" need not be an inevitable or permanent part of life, nor be the defining attribute of it. The essays mostly and ostensibly about poetry, writing style, expression and all its sources and destinations are in a larger sense and ultimately about larger life than most are accustomed to, and than most can even conceive of. The essays packed with serious and reflective thought, earnest with teaching and persuasion, and buoyant with inspiration and possibility demonstrate once again that the best writing on politics, culture, and individual life and its choices usually comes from accomplished poets such as Scully. Essays of Seamus Heaney are another example.

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Late Blooming Yoga Practice
108 Stars for Leza Lowitz Yoga Poems!!
the poetry of yoga
Wonderful! Wonderful! Beautiful! Beautiful!
If you practice yoga, buy this book!

Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold by
Leza Lowitz
Manufacturer: Stone Bridge Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1933330112

Book Description

The sixty poems in this book are windows into the mind/body/spirit experiences that come about through yoga practice. Each poem is named for a posture or breath exercise and is inspired by the physical properties of the pose or some aspect of breathing that led the poet to deeper understanding. Listening to these poems read aloud, or contemplating them on one's own, will help yoga students understand their own struggles and inspire them on the way to personal transformation.

Customer Reviews:

Late Blooming Yoga Practice.......2004-01-02

As someone who came to Yoga after 60, I have found Yoga Poems:Lines to Unfold By from author Leza Lowitz inspiring! Not only has she given a beautiful voice to the asanas but she has given me the desire to go even deeper into the heart of Yoga practice. I can visualize the poses in her poetic imagery. The poems are as serene as Yoga is meant to be. I loved the illustrations and only wish that each pose had its own rather than just those introducing the various sections.
Donna Mendelsohn

108 Stars for Leza Lowitz Yoga Poems!!.......2003-07-02

This is a delightful, delicious, exquisite book. I could nibble on it all day long! Leza's Yoga Poems are lovely to read while sitting in Upavistha Konasana (Seated Wide Angle Pose) or while eating an icecream sandwich after class. It is wonderful company if you are eating dinner alone. This books structure beautifully reflects the eight "limbs" or stages of yoga. Each inspired poem is named after an asana, (the Sanskrit term for a yoga posture), or a breathing practice. Like the other reviewers who practice yoga, I was amazed by how well Leza Lowitz captured the spirit of each asana. She has successfully united her passion for yoga with her love of poetry. The illustrations by yoga teacher and artist Anja Borgstrom are perfect. This is a magical book that also makes a most romantic present. If you are looking for a gift for the special Yogi or Yogini in your Life, or a perfect present for your teacher, I promise, this book will please them!

Suza Francina, author, "Yoga and the Wisdom of Menopause" and "The New Yoga for People Over 50."

the poetry of yoga.......2003-07-02

Yoga Poems: lines to unfold by
tell the truth about more
than the poses they limn;
they tell about we
who unfold in the poses,
our moods
our aspirations
our whims;
lines to unfold by
are lines to live by;
as we learn to unfold the lines
as we learn to unfold the poses
we unfold ourselves.

Wonderful! Wonderful! Beautiful! Beautiful!.......2001-12-27

Her first words spoke as if from my own heart. I am a poet and life is poetry for me...this book is full of life and poetry. Yoga is much more than twists and poses, yoga is an art that lives from within, and from within these poems paint like no other I have read. Simple, passionate and caring, this is a book for the true yogin.

If you practice yoga, buy this book!.......2001-11-05

When I read the poem about the Warrior 2 asana, I was hooked. These poems are evocative and beautiful. Leza Lowitz's book is a pleasure for the mind, for the eyes, for the hands, and for the heart.

Book Description

In the activist verse of this poetic warrior, always committed, the actual world is never out of mind, even in his most intimate poems. Kabbalist, populist, and communist, Hirschman has published over sixty books of his own poetry, and this representative selection is a cross-section of his poetic output, spanning many years and mutations. When he reads aloud, the words take fire, and on the page they crackle and spark.

Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator and editor. His powerfully eloquent voice set the tone for political poetry in this country many years ago. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some forty-five translations from a half a dozen languages, as well the editor of anthologies and journals.

Customer Reviews:

We Need This Man!.......2004-09-10

Jack Hirschman is a living legend. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder and publisher of City Lights, has called him 'one of the three best poets in America today'. This book proves his point over and over. Selected from 50 years of writings by Hirschman, the book is comprehensive as it gets. He is a committed writer. He is for real, no bull, no poses, no posturing,no safety nets,no academia nonesense - none of that stuff. We need this man - now more than ever.

New Worlds Waiting.......2003-04-04

I recently attended a reading by Jack Hirschman and was transfixed not only by his presentation, which is superb, but by his deeply felt message, poetic to a fault, a poetry that urges us all to be much better than we are. Jack is a revolutionary whose poetic imagery, as well as his politics, are born of the heart--born of knowing the full capacity of the human spirit. The U.S. is blessed for poets like him. He uses the art of poetry as the greatest artisans of language do; respectful, knowing his craft, while sharing the wisdom that just might prod us toward creating a better world. These poems span the years from 1952 to the present, so there's a lot of history here; in the process, the poetry itself mirrors back the poet's own growth,literary skill, patience with his fellow beings, and compassion. I applaud City Lights for publishing this man. He's an important writer.

Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (Writing Baseball)

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The best baseball poetry book out there
Variety and quality

Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (Writing Baseball)

Manufacturer: Southern Illinois University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0809324407

Book Description

“We wait for baseball all winter long,” Bill Littlefield wrote in Boston Magazine a decade ago, “or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that’s what poets do, too.”

Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line, like baseball itself game after game and season after season, these poems manage to make the old and the familiar new and surprising.

The poems in these pages invite interrogation, and the reader—like the true baseball fan—must be willing to play the game, for these poems are fun, fresh, angry, nostalgic, meditative, and meant to be read aloud. They are keen on taking us deeply into baseball as sport and intent on offering countless metaphors for exploring history, religion, love, family, and self-identity. Each poem delivers images of pure beauty as the poets speak of murder and ghost runners and old ball gloves, of baseball as a tie that binds families—and indeed the nation—together, of the game as a stage upon which no-nonsense grit and skill are routinely displayed, and of the delight experienced in being one amid a mindlessly happy crowd. This book is true to the game’s long season and to the lives of those the game engages.

Customer Reviews:

The best baseball poetry book out there.......2004-02-05

When it comes to baseball poetry, nobody knows his stuff better than Tim Wiles, and that expertise is evident in the outstanding quality of this collection. Many of the expected poets are here, but so are many I'd never heard of before whose work I am glad to have been exposed to. The poems range in tone from somber and serious to playful and irreverent. One of my particular favorites is the entry by former pitcher Dan Quisenberry, who was a funny guy and had quite a way with words.

I keep this book on my nightstand and try to read one poem each night before I go to sleep. Except I often have a hard time reading just one.

Variety and quality.......2003-11-03

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. Sometimes with anthologies of sports-related fiction/poetry, I've been disappointed because there seemed to be differing levels of quality. With Line Drives, I was satisfied because all of the poems were worth reading-they offered a consistently high level of quality and all had interesting insights or fun ideas. Then there were a number of them that were among the best baseball poems I have ever read. Katharine Harer's "The Cure" speaks with a tremendous depth of understanding of the game and the emotions that go into our continued obsession with it. Joseph Stanton's "Stealing Home" uses an engaging poetic technique to compare the difficult return to the place where we grew up with that difficult play in the game. Dan Quisenberry's "Baseball Cards" offers an important perspective on players' insecurities and the myriad aspects of their lives that fans never see.

I also appreciated that the poems collected here do not revert to cliché comparisons or images when they connect baseball to life. In fact, some of them work against clichés. David C. Ward's "Isn't it pretty to think so?" challenges the idealization of fathers and sons playing catch and reminds us that individual experience is much more powerful and thought-provoking than any (false) perfect image. The poems felt fresh and that was in large part because many of the poets used personal experience as the starting point, reaching out to the game to make connections between their lives and those of the reader. As a result, I think that even those who are not baseball fans would appreciate and enjoy many of these poems. As a baseball fan, I know I'll enjoy rereading this collection and I think most baseball fans would as well.

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Line by Line: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry

Manufacturer: Ekstasis Editions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1896860508

Book Description

From the Introduction: Drawing Canadian poets in performance has always been my particular pleasure. It's different from making a formal portrait -- the poet is there but not static -- involved and moving with the poem in personal, intimate ways I can hone in on if I pay close enough attention. It is a special way of listening.
Heather Spears

Book Description

anthology, tr Alegria & Flakoll, bilingual

Customer Reviews:

Voices of struggle and hope.......2001-01-23

"On the Front Line: Guerrilla Poems of El Salvador" is, as the title indicates, a poetry anthology with a very specific focus. This book has been edited and translated by Claribel Alegria and Darwin J. Flakoll. Alegria is a distinguished poet who grew up on El Salvador, and Flakoll (who has since died) was her husband and longtime literary collaborator. Those who are moved or intrigued by this book should seek out some of their other work.

As the editors explain in the brief introduction, this volume brings together poetry written by Salvadoran revolutionaries who took part in the civil war against the government of that troubled nation. Many of the contributors are identified only by their first name and job within the revolutionary movement. The contributors include literacy teachers, political educators, and members of the guerrilla forces.

The poets in "On the Front Line" write about violence, literacy, economic struggle, love, and poetry itself. The tones of the pieces range widely: angry, ironic, determined, affectionate, hopeful. Some of the poems employ a Marxist rhetoric which some readers may find distracting, but that others may appreciate.

There are many standouts in this remarkable gathering. In "Pregnancy," by Lety, an expectant mother speaks with great tenderness about the child in her womb: "Mute astronaut / I sense your small life / sending me cyphered messages from your warm space." And "What Is Poetry?", by Eduardo Sancho Castaneda, is a brilliant and biting meditation on the art of poetry itself: "Poetry is subversion, it's a tree whose roots gnaw away at the rock."

Do the editors and poets in this volume have a political agenda? Yes, but this agenda does not take away from the power and value of the poems in this collection. And for that matter, don't most poets (and critics!) have "agendas" of one sort or another? "On the Front Line" is a fascinating and worthwhile anthology. If you are interested in poetry, politics, or Latin American studies, I believe you will find yourself enriched by this book.

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