"Did you ever wonder what it would be like to listen to some of the great poets reciting their poems?"

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to listen to Alfred, Lord Tennyson recite some of his most well known poems?

How about T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Ogden Nash and many more.

These are only a sampling of some of the 42 deceased poets, who speak to us in a book so appropriately entitled, Poetry Speaks.

Unfortunately, many of us never had the opportunity to experience poem(s) that, as the editors of this wonderful book indicate, "speaks to each of us at another level, below our consciousness. Like music, it reaches inside to touch us."

Not only does this book and its accompanying 3 CDs enable us to listen to these great men and women of letters, but we also can read along with them, and learn about the different schools and types of poets- Victorians, Imagists, Modernists, Harlem Renaissance poets, Black Mountain poets, Beat poets, and Black Arts Movement poets.

To facilitate the reading and appreciating of the book, the editors have conveniently provided us with a table of contents listing the poets' names, their life span dates, poems included in the book, as well as a track list of the recited works contained on the CDs.

Each chapter devotes itself to one specific poet, and the chapters are arranged in chronological order by birth date. Within each chapter readers are presented with a short biography that is meant to be an introduction to the poet's life.

To further pique our interests, the editors provide essays about the poets written by prominent living poets. As indicated, "these essays can help you gain a very different insight into each of the poets." What is also fascinating is the inclusion of many rare handwritten manuscripts, letters, or photographs that aid in our understanding of the poets.

One word of caution, when listening to some of the poems you will notice that some of the readings are very different from the published versions. As the editors indicate, "poets are constant revisers and they sometimes change a poem even in the middle of a reading. This is another level of understanding that can't be achieved by simply reading or listening to a poem."

British essayist, William Hazlitt, most aptly described poetry, when he stated in his essay entitled,On Poetry in General:

"Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else." After devouring this remarkable book and the accompanying CDs, I can well understand why Hazlitt came to this conclusion.

Reviewed by Norman Goldman
Courtesy Bookpleasures
Posted May 13, 2003

Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby (Editors)