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The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink
Food and poetry: in so many ways, a natural pairing, from prayers over bread to street vendor songs. Poetry is said to feed the soul, each poem a delicious morsel. When read aloud, the best poems provide a particular joy for the mouth. Poems about food make these satisfactions explicit and complete.
Of course, pages can and have been filled about food's elemental pleasures....more
Of course, pages can and have been filled about food's elemental pleasures....more
Hardcover, 336 pages
Published
October 16th 2012
by Bloomsbury USA
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When someone says you’ll “eat your words,” I don’t think they had poetry in mind. Yet in the new anthology The Hungry Ear, compiled and edited by Kevin Young, we are invited to gnaw on more than 100 morsels in poetic form.
When it comes down to it, there is perhaps no better metaphor for poetry’s place in our lives than food—it is soul food, comfort food, the thing that reminds of us home and memory and love and longing. It is at once delicate and messy, an idea manifested in the mess of a meal o...more
When it comes down to it, there is perhaps no better metaphor for poetry’s place in our lives than food—it is soul food, comfort food, the thing that reminds of us home and memory and love and longing. It is at once delicate and messy, an idea manifested in the mess of a meal o...more
This book made me hungry! Hungry to eat, hungry to read, hungry to write. Kevin Young has put together a wide-ranging, eclectic collection with something for all tastes. His ordering is brilliant, and I could find no slant or bias in style in terms of the poems he picked. They range all over in time, in style, in poet, in place. The common denominator is food, and food is lyrically described, made into metaphor, used as a launching pad into story and memory. I loved nearly every poem, and there...more
All anthologies of poetry contain better poems, worse poems and lots of poems in between; the differences are usually better explained by the variety of readers than by the variety of verse. Professor Kevin Young of Emory University gathered 158 poems which are, in some way, connected with food, eating or drinking. I would have chosen differently and so would you. He strangely omits anything from Ogden Nash's wonderful collection "Food." He should have included the character Maya's wine speech t...more
Recommended by NPR. While I did not read every single poem in this collection, what I did read I liked a lot. The book's wonderful introduction by poet Kevin Young is a thoughtful summary on the place of food in our lives: birth, death, learning, listening, sharing, in good times and in bad times, etc. The poems themselves are arranged by the seasons and are contributed by famous poets such as Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and others who are not quite so famous yet have a great voice...more
Great stuff. One of the best poetry anthologies I've read. It's organized by season. The order of these selected poems tells a story. One that makes me hungry.
Truly memorable and moving poems about the world of food.
As far as poetry goes I usually don't pick it up and probably due to the fact over the years it has been elevated to something rather esoteric. But I rather loved this collection because it made poetry so accessible because it was dedicated to a subject that everyone understands and has a relationship with: food and drink. I think this would make a great introductory collection of poetry to anyone's home library. Because the poetry is varied it allows for so many possible instances of someone ac...more
I think that this is a truly spectacular collection of poems - put together very well. The poems are excellent, moving, thoughtful. I feel like I will be going back to these poems over and over again. They help one see the world more clearly.
A little too diverse for me - I wish the poems had been organized by style instead of by type of food.
page 69The Root Cellar by Theodroe Roethke - wow!
not always a fan of Billy Collins but Osso Bucco (page 100-101) is sumptuous.
not always a fan of Billy Collins but Osso Bucco (page 100-101) is sumptuous.
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Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, You...more
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Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, You...more
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Feb 02, 2013 02:44pm