David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 90
August 22, 2022
August 21, 2022
A Fine Collection by a Contemporary Welsh Poet
Parables & Faxes by Gwyneth Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Gwyneth Lewis is a Welsh writer whose poetry in English is infused with the Welsh language and land. But there are touches of cummings and Dickinson in such poems as “A Fanciful Marriage” and “Annunciation.”Her humor and slantwise look at living in this world are graced with a humane touch and a lyrical voice. She uses patterns of lines with end half-rhymes that are enjambed so the music is there but subtle. Lewis views modern life through a lens of fable and some whimsy, weaving the human and the natural in close identification. She is unheralded today in the US and should be read as a partial antidote to the prosy fracturing of the late Postmodern verse that pervades MFA programs.
Why Are We Not Better Than We Are: How Poetry Saves Lives – The Marginalian
“A life of patient suffering… is a better poem in itself than we can any of us write,” the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich wrote to Emily Dickinson shortly before her untimely death. “It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical, that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.”
Read the rest of this wonderful post HERE.
Reading fiction and poetry grows our empathy for others—and for ourselves.
