Sounds Good Book

If you don't care about the beautiful sounds of language, read a newspaper or telephone book. If, on the other hand, the music of words delights you as much as their meaning--or you remember a time when it did--Sounds Good, to quote Coleridge, is a "stately pleasure-dome" indeed. Rather than the usual reliance on rational intelligence to "figure out" a poet's intended meaning, editor Christopher Reid suggests that "the ear may understand a poem before the mind has been able to grasp it". Long before we make the cognitive leap, for instance, that Sylvia Plath, in "Mushrooms", is using barely noticed fungi as metaphors for meek humans who "shall by morning / Inherit the earth" we hear the insistent, hammer-like beat of their (and her) intent: Nobody sees us, Stops us, betrays us; The small grains make room. Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding, Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless, Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes... Never mind these stressed words are what poets call, in meter-speak, dactyls and spondees. The important part is hearing them thud. Reid has chosen carefully, including some of our finest poets--from Auden to Yeats, plus 99 mellifluous stops in between. In a "Notes" section, pithy, page-by-page insights into metrical, syntactical and rhythmical tricks of the trade are given, so you'll learn, for example, that anapaests propel Stevenson's "Railway Carriage", and Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" is written in triple time. Also included for good measure (so to speak): an obligatory trip to Xanadu. -- Martha SilanoRead More