Book Logging (Poetry)
Apr. 25th, 2021 02:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI'm no longer trying to write notes on all of the books of poetry that I've read. I keep not recording any details and then having the books blur together so that I no longer remember which books were which. Even a few days after I finish a book of poetry, I likely won't remember much about it.
Some of the books below are things that need content warnings for people who might read them. Consider that a 'here be dragons' for the cut texts.
Acton, Harold. Aquarium - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I got about 20 pages in and found what I read tedious.
Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914 - Project Gutenberg. Poems published in US magazines during 1914, chosen by William Stanley Braithwaite. A fair percentage of the poems address the start of war in Europe, and there's a line down the middle between those who think the US ought to go to war and those who think that war is too horrible ever to be a good idea, including some grim battlefield descriptions that I'm more used to seeing in poems published after the war.
Asghar, Fatimah. If They Come for Us - Library book. This one is complicated because some of what Asghar writes about is generational and that blurs into the more personal/immediate poems, too. It's all traumatic. The violence of the Partition of India, immigrating to the US, growing up orphaned, Muslim, and queer in the US.
Bambrick, Taneum. Vantage - Library book. DNF. Too much violent imagery in terms of dismemberment and decomposition.
Beresford, C.E. de la Poer. A Happy New Year and Other Verses - Project Gutenberg. Google is giving me an article from the early 20th century written by a Colonel of this name. The subject matter of one seems to fit with places mentioned in these poems. The other place I found the name was a reference to someone of this name with the rank of major who had written on the history of the de la Poer Beresford family. Anyway, the poetry is mediocre and with the longer ones kind of pretentious in terms of allusions to Samarkand and Timur and the shorter ones politically conservative and trite.
Biber, Rebecca G. Technical Solace - Library book.
Cather, Willa. April Twilights and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg.
Cawein, Madison J. Accolon of Gaul with Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I bounced hard off this book. The title poem is long and dense and confusing; I might even call it purple. I wonder if Cawein was trying to do something epic and grand with this bit of Arthuriana. I read 12 pages out of the 64 that "Accolon of Gaul" runs. I tried some of the shorter poems in the middle of the book and just couldn't. Wikipedia says that Cawein was known as 'the Keats of Kentucky' during his lifetime.
Child Maidelvold and Other Ballads - Project Gutenberg. Collection of four ballads. This is the sort of thing that's only really interesting to me with annotations/historical context. I didn't recognize the characters, but the stories followed predictable shape, so I'm curious as to how these relate to other similar tales or to history and folkloric traditions. Warnings for death, murder, infanticide, rape, the whole nine yards.
Euwer, Anthony. By Scarlet Torch and Blade - Project Gutenberg. This book is in several sections. I liked the tree poems best, each written from the point of view of a particular type of tree. The last section is WWI poems. Some of the other poems in the book come across as folksy but with a bitter sting of humor or of anger. The first two poems in the book read to me as pretentious. The book has black and white illustrations by the author. Euwer doesn't have a Wikipedia article which is strange for a white guy who's documented elsewhere, but I found him on the Poetry Foundation website. The article's not hugely informative but has a photo and says he was born in Pennsylvania and then moved to Oregon. Apparently Woodrow Wilson was a fan. The bio ends with the sentence, "He is the uncle of young adult author w." I am unsure if this means there was supposed to be more to the article or if there's a young adult author known only as 'w' of whom I'm supposed to be aware. This doesn't seem like the sort of thing amenable to Google searches. Euwer's bio on askART is differently informative and doesn't mention his writing at all (but has the same birth/death dates and place of birth), only his educational background and work as a painter and illustrator. It also doesn't mention the mysterious 'w.' Ah, well, I'm sure I'll stop wondering about that eventually.
Felix, Camonghne. Build Yourself a Boat - Library book.
Fessenden, Thomas Green. Terrible Tractoration, and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Publication date 1836 (third US edition). This is satire, and the author on the title page is Dr Christopher Caustic. Some parts of what I read were funny (I'm definitely up for mocking phrenology), but I smacked hard into some verses that were racist as fuck (I'm not up for mocking abolition as dangerous to slaves, especially not with a side order of the idea that abolitionists will require all white women to marry former slaves). I think this might be worthwhile for someone studying the specific time period or, maybe, wanting to get a feel for writing period characters, but I can't recommend it otherwise. Well, apart from the desire to do the literary equivalent of 'Here, try this! It tastes terrible!' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Green_Fessenden
Fletcher, John Gould. Japanese Prints - Project Gutenberg. The poet was trying to imitate Basho in English. I was not sure whether this was a book of translations or Fletcher's original work until I finished and went back to read the introduction in detail. I was also confused by the title because the book contains no actual Japanese prints; the illustrations are the work of Dorothy P. Lathrop.
Ford, Katie. Blood Lyrics - Library book. DNF. These poems were too painful for me to keep going. They focus on the experience of the mother of a baby born premature with uncertainty about survival.
Gluck, Louise. Faithful and Virtuous Night - Overdrive ebook. Slowing down, losing function, revisiting memories. This is very much a mediation on aging and on expecting death.
Green, Leah Naomi. The More Extravagant Feast - Library book. A lot of these poems centered around being pregnant and on caring for a new baby.
Grey, Kimberly. The Opposite of Light - Library book. As far as I could tell, these poems were mostly about falling out of love and ending a marriage.
Hours of Childhood, and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. No clear author. Published 1820 by A. Bowman. The title poems is more than 50 pages long and has no through line. I have no real idea what I read.
Howe, Marie. The Good Thief - Library book. DNF. I read about 9 pages out of 52 and simply didn't enjoy the poems.
Juster, A.M. Wonder & Wrath - Library book. I liked these. I'm disappointed that the library doesn't have more by this author because I found these enjoyable. Then again, this is apparently a pseudonym for a Reagan era government appointee, so maybe I'm not disappointed. If there were more books at the library, I'd want to research the poet more to decide whether or not I was willing to keep reading. This guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Astrue
Lampman, Archibald. Lyrics of Earth - Project Gutenberg. A seasonal cycle of poems. Not deep or striking but also not unpleasant. Readable and clear.
Leigh, Larry. The True Grecian Bend - Project Gutenberg. Published in 1868. Satire mocking upperclass feminine fashion choices. I gave up on it both because it was mean and because it was meaningless to me without a fairly deep dive into period fashion. I couldn't find the author on Wikipedia.
Lyra Celtica (edited by E.A. Sharp and J. Matthay) - Project Gutenberg. Some of the translations are probably more faithful than good. The translators are credited only in the end notes, and the end notes are occasionally difficult to parse with regard to things like whether the poem had even been translated or if it had been written in English by someone from the region in question. Possibly some were translated by the original authors? It wasn't clear. The editor even pulled in some US poets she considered to be of Celtic extraction. The editor also credits one poem incorrectly (I didn't check everything) by assuming that Miss Amice MacDonell and Miss Alice C. MacDonell are different people instead of a typo by the magazine that published one poem, "Culloden Moor" by Amice in 1893 and other poems by Alice in other temporally close issues. Wikipedia credits "Culloden Moor" to Alice as does the Scottish Poetry Library website and, well, everywhere else I looked. The editor put Alice and Amice in the same section, back to back, so I am not certain why she didn't question it. Looking up the editor, Elizabeth Amelia Sharp, I have the impression that she pulled together this anthology at a point when she and her husband were both ill and entirely broke. Certainly, her bio implies that the publisher gave her the job out of concern for her husband. Weirdly, her husband's Wikipedia article doesn't talk about any bit of the litany of financial setbacks and illnesses, hers or his, that are in her article. He was a poet who published under two names, William Sharp (birth name) and a feminine pseudonym, Fiona Macleod. I'm now kind of fascinated by the two of them. Elizabeth published a memoir of William's life several years after his death. I've read about 25% of it now, and very much get the impression that William would have wanted, at least some of the time, to be allowed to live as a woman. It's small hints, and I may be completely misreading, particularly given the more than century between now and then.
Martin, George. Marguerite; or, The Isle of Demons and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. The long narrative poem that begins the book has the virtue of clarity; I was never at a loss to understand what was happening. It is, however, cloyingly tragic and sentimental. Later poems did not give me a higher opinion of the work. I can't track this author on Wikipedia (his name is in red in the article about Marguerite de La Rocque under the section about literary retellings of her story). I didn't attempt a more general search because the name is too common.
McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows - Project Gutenberg. McKay was a Black writer from Jamaica whose works were part of the Harlem Renaissance. These poems were all fine, not spectacular but also in no way bad. My biggest emotional reaction was actually to the foreword which was horrifyingly racist in the 'this one's not like those others' sort of way, including a dig at Paul Laurence Dunbar. I recommend skipping that bit if you want to read the poetry.
McKillen, Arch Alfred. The Death of the Scharnhorst and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. Published in the 1950s. I couldn't find anything online about the author beyond a review that quoted the bio on the book cover. The book cover and the Project Gutenberg tagging make this look like it's primarily WWII poems. That's not entirely accurate, or, rather, I'd call it extremely incomplete. A lot of the poems are threaded through with attraction to other men, with desire for male friends who don't love the author the same way the author loves them, and with the need to hide all of that for fear of what will happen if anyone notices. It's heartbreaking. The author enlisted in the US Navy in 1939 and was assigned to the USS Tennessee at Pearl Harbor. The poems about his experiences in the Pacific Theater have a lot in common with WWI poems about war.
Murphy, Ethel Allen. The Angel of Thought, and Other Poems: Impressions from Old Masters - Project Gutenberg. This is a collection of poems inspired by art held, at the time, by 'The Art Department of the Indiana University.' There are only nine poems, none of them long. I didn't count feet or lines for all of them, but I think they're all sonnets. The Project Gutenberg version I looked at included links to 'modern versions' of the art in question. (I think 'modern' means 'color photograph as opposed to the black and white images printed in the book.) The poems are not terrible, but they're also not particularly good or inspired. I couldn't find a Wikipedia page for the author. I found a 1933 obituary for someone of that name who lived in Kentucky and had worked as a teacher in the Louisville schools for 33 years, but the obituary didn't mention the book and might be for an entirely different person. I found a record of a master's thesis/doctoral dissertation at the University of Louisville in 1911 on 'Some peculiarities of Shelley's rhythm.' If the dissertation and the obituary are for the same person, she must have taught while enrolled at the university.
Owen, Wilfred. Poems - Project Gutenberg. 1921 reprint. Contains multiple drafts of some poems (no one's quite sure which versions were the final ones). Owens died very close to the end of WWI. These poems are grim, grinding, and heartbreaking.
Phillips, Xandria. Hull - Library book.
Rafferty, Charles. The Smoke of Horses - Library book. These were paragraphs more than poems while still using poetic idioms and rhythms.
Rand, Theodore H. Song-Waves - Project Gutenberg. This was mostly trite which made the book seem much longer than it was. I seem to recall liking another book by this author, but now I'm wondering if I misremember because Wikipedia lists this as published after that. Then again, this was published the year he died and lists his wife's name as the person who-- I think-- registered the copyright ("Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand nine hundred, by EMELINE A. RAND, at the Department of Agriculture." Why the Dept of Agriculture? I have no idea), so it might be a posthumous publication of early works and/or unedited works. The fact that there's a line that says "Christ, Heaven's Morning Star" seems to me to support the idea of un- or under-edited. Wikipedia is decidedly uninterested in Rand's poetry, so I can't base any guesses on that article. This book has more religious poems and more discussion of love than I recall from the other book. This book is dedicated to his wife and seems to be an anniversary gift. Maybe? Most of these poems are untitled and 12 lines (3 stanzas of 4 lines each) long, but other untitled poems are 11 lines with only 3 lines in the last stanza. I can't tell if those are incomplete or deliberate. The rhyme scheme is a, a, b, a for the 4 line stanzas and a, a, b for the 3 line ones. The last 20 or so pages of the book are titled poems with different rhyme schemes and line count.
Robinson, Roger. A Portable Paradise - Library book. DNF. This is not a collection to read when already depressed.
Ryan, Kay. The Niagara River - Library book.
Schmuhl, Elizabeth. Premonitions - Library book. DNF because all of the poems I read (about a dozen) focused on self harm and suicide. I didn't want to go there.
Sealey, Nicole. Ordinary Beasts - Library book. I liked some of these and not others. And now I know what a cento is. I even managed to track the origins of most of the lines from the cento here that I thought might make good story titles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cento_(poetry)
Smith, Carmen Gimenez. Be Recorder - Library book. DNF. I found the words running together in ways that didn't make sense to me. Selecting books of poetry by unfamiliar-to-me authors more or less randomly means I find a lot of things I don't understand. Each poet speaks a different language, and I can only read some of them.
Steele, Edward S. Armenia Immolata - Project Gutenberg. It seems to have been self published in 1896 in Washington DC. This is only 11 pages long. Wikipedia doesn't recognize the author or the title, so I'm left wondering about the author's connection to Armenia. The poem starts off a little mocking but gets bitter and angry very fast. Given the publication date and the things said in the poem, the author clearly expects state sanctioned theft, murder, rape, and mutilation. He expects Armenians to starve for being Armenians in Turkish lands, and he knows that Americans won't do anything but shake their hands over how bad it is and that western European powers are too worried about balance of power to accept responsibility when it's inconvenient. I find it depression that the genocide was so obviously on the horizon that early and still ignored. It's not surprising, but it is depressing. NOTE: The poem is heavily Christian and not at all friendly to Muslims as a monolithic group.
Van Doren, Mark. Mortal Summer - Project Gutenberg. 1953. DNF. I couldn't figure out why I should care. Three archangels and seven Greek gods intervene in a really mundane human tangle and make it more sordid and painful. I'm not sure if the listed author is the Mark Van Doren I found on Wikipedia or not as this title is not listed in that poet's bibliography on Wikipedia in spite of the dates fitting.
Some of the books below are things that need content warnings for people who might read them. Consider that a 'here be dragons' for the cut texts.
Acton, Harold. Aquarium - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I got about 20 pages in and found what I read tedious.
Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914 - Project Gutenberg. Poems published in US magazines during 1914, chosen by William Stanley Braithwaite. A fair percentage of the poems address the start of war in Europe, and there's a line down the middle between those who think the US ought to go to war and those who think that war is too horrible ever to be a good idea, including some grim battlefield descriptions that I'm more used to seeing in poems published after the war.
Asghar, Fatimah. If They Come for Us - Library book. This one is complicated because some of what Asghar writes about is generational and that blurs into the more personal/immediate poems, too. It's all traumatic. The violence of the Partition of India, immigrating to the US, growing up orphaned, Muslim, and queer in the US.
Bambrick, Taneum. Vantage - Library book. DNF. Too much violent imagery in terms of dismemberment and decomposition.
Beresford, C.E. de la Poer. A Happy New Year and Other Verses - Project Gutenberg. Google is giving me an article from the early 20th century written by a Colonel of this name. The subject matter of one seems to fit with places mentioned in these poems. The other place I found the name was a reference to someone of this name with the rank of major who had written on the history of the de la Poer Beresford family. Anyway, the poetry is mediocre and with the longer ones kind of pretentious in terms of allusions to Samarkand and Timur and the shorter ones politically conservative and trite.
Biber, Rebecca G. Technical Solace - Library book.
Cather, Willa. April Twilights and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg.
Cawein, Madison J. Accolon of Gaul with Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I bounced hard off this book. The title poem is long and dense and confusing; I might even call it purple. I wonder if Cawein was trying to do something epic and grand with this bit of Arthuriana. I read 12 pages out of the 64 that "Accolon of Gaul" runs. I tried some of the shorter poems in the middle of the book and just couldn't. Wikipedia says that Cawein was known as 'the Keats of Kentucky' during his lifetime.
Child Maidelvold and Other Ballads - Project Gutenberg. Collection of four ballads. This is the sort of thing that's only really interesting to me with annotations/historical context. I didn't recognize the characters, but the stories followed predictable shape, so I'm curious as to how these relate to other similar tales or to history and folkloric traditions. Warnings for death, murder, infanticide, rape, the whole nine yards.
Euwer, Anthony. By Scarlet Torch and Blade - Project Gutenberg. This book is in several sections. I liked the tree poems best, each written from the point of view of a particular type of tree. The last section is WWI poems. Some of the other poems in the book come across as folksy but with a bitter sting of humor or of anger. The first two poems in the book read to me as pretentious. The book has black and white illustrations by the author. Euwer doesn't have a Wikipedia article which is strange for a white guy who's documented elsewhere, but I found him on the Poetry Foundation website. The article's not hugely informative but has a photo and says he was born in Pennsylvania and then moved to Oregon. Apparently Woodrow Wilson was a fan. The bio ends with the sentence, "He is the uncle of young adult author w." I am unsure if this means there was supposed to be more to the article or if there's a young adult author known only as 'w' of whom I'm supposed to be aware. This doesn't seem like the sort of thing amenable to Google searches. Euwer's bio on askART is differently informative and doesn't mention his writing at all (but has the same birth/death dates and place of birth), only his educational background and work as a painter and illustrator. It also doesn't mention the mysterious 'w.' Ah, well, I'm sure I'll stop wondering about that eventually.
Felix, Camonghne. Build Yourself a Boat - Library book.
Fessenden, Thomas Green. Terrible Tractoration, and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Publication date 1836 (third US edition). This is satire, and the author on the title page is Dr Christopher Caustic. Some parts of what I read were funny (I'm definitely up for mocking phrenology), but I smacked hard into some verses that were racist as fuck (I'm not up for mocking abolition as dangerous to slaves, especially not with a side order of the idea that abolitionists will require all white women to marry former slaves). I think this might be worthwhile for someone studying the specific time period or, maybe, wanting to get a feel for writing period characters, but I can't recommend it otherwise. Well, apart from the desire to do the literary equivalent of 'Here, try this! It tastes terrible!' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Green_Fessenden
Fletcher, John Gould. Japanese Prints - Project Gutenberg. The poet was trying to imitate Basho in English. I was not sure whether this was a book of translations or Fletcher's original work until I finished and went back to read the introduction in detail. I was also confused by the title because the book contains no actual Japanese prints; the illustrations are the work of Dorothy P. Lathrop.
Ford, Katie. Blood Lyrics - Library book. DNF. These poems were too painful for me to keep going. They focus on the experience of the mother of a baby born premature with uncertainty about survival.
Gluck, Louise. Faithful and Virtuous Night - Overdrive ebook. Slowing down, losing function, revisiting memories. This is very much a mediation on aging and on expecting death.
Green, Leah Naomi. The More Extravagant Feast - Library book. A lot of these poems centered around being pregnant and on caring for a new baby.
Grey, Kimberly. The Opposite of Light - Library book. As far as I could tell, these poems were mostly about falling out of love and ending a marriage.
Hours of Childhood, and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. No clear author. Published 1820 by A. Bowman. The title poems is more than 50 pages long and has no through line. I have no real idea what I read.
Howe, Marie. The Good Thief - Library book. DNF. I read about 9 pages out of 52 and simply didn't enjoy the poems.
Juster, A.M. Wonder & Wrath - Library book. I liked these. I'm disappointed that the library doesn't have more by this author because I found these enjoyable. Then again, this is apparently a pseudonym for a Reagan era government appointee, so maybe I'm not disappointed. If there were more books at the library, I'd want to research the poet more to decide whether or not I was willing to keep reading. This guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Astrue
Lampman, Archibald. Lyrics of Earth - Project Gutenberg. A seasonal cycle of poems. Not deep or striking but also not unpleasant. Readable and clear.
Leigh, Larry. The True Grecian Bend - Project Gutenberg. Published in 1868. Satire mocking upperclass feminine fashion choices. I gave up on it both because it was mean and because it was meaningless to me without a fairly deep dive into period fashion. I couldn't find the author on Wikipedia.
Lyra Celtica (edited by E.A. Sharp and J. Matthay) - Project Gutenberg. Some of the translations are probably more faithful than good. The translators are credited only in the end notes, and the end notes are occasionally difficult to parse with regard to things like whether the poem had even been translated or if it had been written in English by someone from the region in question. Possibly some were translated by the original authors? It wasn't clear. The editor even pulled in some US poets she considered to be of Celtic extraction. The editor also credits one poem incorrectly (I didn't check everything) by assuming that Miss Amice MacDonell and Miss Alice C. MacDonell are different people instead of a typo by the magazine that published one poem, "Culloden Moor" by Amice in 1893 and other poems by Alice in other temporally close issues. Wikipedia credits "Culloden Moor" to Alice as does the Scottish Poetry Library website and, well, everywhere else I looked. The editor put Alice and Amice in the same section, back to back, so I am not certain why she didn't question it. Looking up the editor, Elizabeth Amelia Sharp, I have the impression that she pulled together this anthology at a point when she and her husband were both ill and entirely broke. Certainly, her bio implies that the publisher gave her the job out of concern for her husband. Weirdly, her husband's Wikipedia article doesn't talk about any bit of the litany of financial setbacks and illnesses, hers or his, that are in her article. He was a poet who published under two names, William Sharp (birth name) and a feminine pseudonym, Fiona Macleod. I'm now kind of fascinated by the two of them. Elizabeth published a memoir of William's life several years after his death. I've read about 25% of it now, and very much get the impression that William would have wanted, at least some of the time, to be allowed to live as a woman. It's small hints, and I may be completely misreading, particularly given the more than century between now and then.
Martin, George. Marguerite; or, The Isle of Demons and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. The long narrative poem that begins the book has the virtue of clarity; I was never at a loss to understand what was happening. It is, however, cloyingly tragic and sentimental. Later poems did not give me a higher opinion of the work. I can't track this author on Wikipedia (his name is in red in the article about Marguerite de La Rocque under the section about literary retellings of her story). I didn't attempt a more general search because the name is too common.
McKay, Claude. Harlem Shadows - Project Gutenberg. McKay was a Black writer from Jamaica whose works were part of the Harlem Renaissance. These poems were all fine, not spectacular but also in no way bad. My biggest emotional reaction was actually to the foreword which was horrifyingly racist in the 'this one's not like those others' sort of way, including a dig at Paul Laurence Dunbar. I recommend skipping that bit if you want to read the poetry.
McKillen, Arch Alfred. The Death of the Scharnhorst and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. Published in the 1950s. I couldn't find anything online about the author beyond a review that quoted the bio on the book cover. The book cover and the Project Gutenberg tagging make this look like it's primarily WWII poems. That's not entirely accurate, or, rather, I'd call it extremely incomplete. A lot of the poems are threaded through with attraction to other men, with desire for male friends who don't love the author the same way the author loves them, and with the need to hide all of that for fear of what will happen if anyone notices. It's heartbreaking. The author enlisted in the US Navy in 1939 and was assigned to the USS Tennessee at Pearl Harbor. The poems about his experiences in the Pacific Theater have a lot in common with WWI poems about war.
Murphy, Ethel Allen. The Angel of Thought, and Other Poems: Impressions from Old Masters - Project Gutenberg. This is a collection of poems inspired by art held, at the time, by 'The Art Department of the Indiana University.' There are only nine poems, none of them long. I didn't count feet or lines for all of them, but I think they're all sonnets. The Project Gutenberg version I looked at included links to 'modern versions' of the art in question. (I think 'modern' means 'color photograph as opposed to the black and white images printed in the book.) The poems are not terrible, but they're also not particularly good or inspired. I couldn't find a Wikipedia page for the author. I found a 1933 obituary for someone of that name who lived in Kentucky and had worked as a teacher in the Louisville schools for 33 years, but the obituary didn't mention the book and might be for an entirely different person. I found a record of a master's thesis/doctoral dissertation at the University of Louisville in 1911 on 'Some peculiarities of Shelley's rhythm.' If the dissertation and the obituary are for the same person, she must have taught while enrolled at the university.
Owen, Wilfred. Poems - Project Gutenberg. 1921 reprint. Contains multiple drafts of some poems (no one's quite sure which versions were the final ones). Owens died very close to the end of WWI. These poems are grim, grinding, and heartbreaking.
Phillips, Xandria. Hull - Library book.
Rafferty, Charles. The Smoke of Horses - Library book. These were paragraphs more than poems while still using poetic idioms and rhythms.
Rand, Theodore H. Song-Waves - Project Gutenberg. This was mostly trite which made the book seem much longer than it was. I seem to recall liking another book by this author, but now I'm wondering if I misremember because Wikipedia lists this as published after that. Then again, this was published the year he died and lists his wife's name as the person who-- I think-- registered the copyright ("Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand nine hundred, by EMELINE A. RAND, at the Department of Agriculture." Why the Dept of Agriculture? I have no idea), so it might be a posthumous publication of early works and/or unedited works. The fact that there's a line that says "Christ, Heaven's Morning Star" seems to me to support the idea of un- or under-edited. Wikipedia is decidedly uninterested in Rand's poetry, so I can't base any guesses on that article. This book has more religious poems and more discussion of love than I recall from the other book. This book is dedicated to his wife and seems to be an anniversary gift. Maybe? Most of these poems are untitled and 12 lines (3 stanzas of 4 lines each) long, but other untitled poems are 11 lines with only 3 lines in the last stanza. I can't tell if those are incomplete or deliberate. The rhyme scheme is a, a, b, a for the 4 line stanzas and a, a, b for the 3 line ones. The last 20 or so pages of the book are titled poems with different rhyme schemes and line count.
Robinson, Roger. A Portable Paradise - Library book. DNF. This is not a collection to read when already depressed.
Ryan, Kay. The Niagara River - Library book.
Schmuhl, Elizabeth. Premonitions - Library book. DNF because all of the poems I read (about a dozen) focused on self harm and suicide. I didn't want to go there.
Sealey, Nicole. Ordinary Beasts - Library book. I liked some of these and not others. And now I know what a cento is. I even managed to track the origins of most of the lines from the cento here that I thought might make good story titles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cento_(poetry)
Smith, Carmen Gimenez. Be Recorder - Library book. DNF. I found the words running together in ways that didn't make sense to me. Selecting books of poetry by unfamiliar-to-me authors more or less randomly means I find a lot of things I don't understand. Each poet speaks a different language, and I can only read some of them.
Steele, Edward S. Armenia Immolata - Project Gutenberg. It seems to have been self published in 1896 in Washington DC. This is only 11 pages long. Wikipedia doesn't recognize the author or the title, so I'm left wondering about the author's connection to Armenia. The poem starts off a little mocking but gets bitter and angry very fast. Given the publication date and the things said in the poem, the author clearly expects state sanctioned theft, murder, rape, and mutilation. He expects Armenians to starve for being Armenians in Turkish lands, and he knows that Americans won't do anything but shake their hands over how bad it is and that western European powers are too worried about balance of power to accept responsibility when it's inconvenient. I find it depression that the genocide was so obviously on the horizon that early and still ignored. It's not surprising, but it is depressing. NOTE: The poem is heavily Christian and not at all friendly to Muslims as a monolithic group.
Van Doren, Mark. Mortal Summer - Project Gutenberg. 1953. DNF. I couldn't figure out why I should care. Three archangels and seven Greek gods intervene in a really mundane human tangle and make it more sordid and painful. I'm not sure if the listed author is the Mark Van Doren I found on Wikipedia or not as this title is not listed in that poet's bibliography on Wikipedia in spite of the dates fitting.
