Click Here To Purchase From Amazon Poetry Speaks Expanded

Editors: Elise Paschen & Rebekah Presson Mosby

Publishers: Sourcebooks MediaFusion, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.ISBN: 13: 978-1-4022-1062-4: 10:1-4022-1062-0

 One again I have been blessed with the opportunity to review an extraordinary sampling of poetry published by Sourcebooks with their Poetry Speaks Expanded that is a sequel to the first edition Poetry Speaks published in 2001. As with the first edition, Poetry Speaks Expanded includes three CDs, and as I savored these beautiful poems, it reminded me of French poet Charles Baudelaire who wrote, “Anyman can go without food for two days-but not without poetry.” 

 This expanded edition honors forty-seven deceased poetic masters as Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Yeats, Stein, Frost, Sanburg, Stevens, Joyce, Williams, Pound, Jeffers, Ransom, Eliot, Millay, Parker, Cummings, and many more. It also includes an extra forty-five extra minutes of recordings as well as an additional one hundred pages of new poems and readings.  And it certainly admirably lives up to its promise of its publishers that it is an attempt to collect some of the best poetry ever written as read by the poets.

What is quite remarkable is the inclusion of some rare recordings as that of the legendary Jack Kerouac reading his Haiku poetry, James Joyce reading the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” episode from FinnegansWake, and Ogden Nash, who was probably one of the most widely read poet in America during the mid 1900s.

 The collection is divided into forty-seven chapters arranged in chronological order by the dates of birth of each of the poets. Readers are introduced to the poet with a short biography followed by an essay written by a prominent living poet assist us in gaining an insight into each of the poets. And as the introduction mentions, these essays are also meant to expose to us, albeit via prose, some of the great poets of today such as Sonia Sanchez, W.S.Merwin, Seamus Heaney, Robert Bly, Jorie Graham, Billy Collins, and Al Young. You will also find further information pertaining to these essayists in brief biographies enabling you to explore more of their work.

Fascinating is the additional inclusion of handwritten manuscripts, letters, or photographs of some of these poets helping us understand what made them tick.

Each poet’s poems are likewise arranged chronologically to reflect when they are thought to have been published and a selection of these poems are included in the audio, and therefore have audio track numbers listed next to the poem’s time and place. For example, if we refer to the chapter pertaining to Ezra Pound we are informed that he was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho and died in 1972. We can listen to his recitation on Disc 1 tracks 35-38.We learn about his education where for a brief time he taught Romance Languages at Wabash College, after which he left for Europe in 1908. He traveled to Venice, where his first volume of poetry was published in 1908, A Lume Spento, and from here he proceeded to London where he settled.

We are also informed that much of his fame rests not only on his own poetry but his promotion and influence on many of his contemporaries’ literary careers. Included in this section is an essay written by Charles Bernstein who asserts and explains why “Ezra Pound was one of the most ambitious, influential, and innovative poets of the Modernist period of the first half of the twentieth century.” Some of Pound’s poems that are included are The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, Cantico Del Sole (from Instigations), In a Station of the Metro, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and XLV from the Cantos. There is even a handwritten manuscript draft by Pound of “XLV”, or “Usura”, from The Cantos.