Dolphins - Hardcover

Spender, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312112645 ISBN 13: 9780312112646

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1994

Synopsis

The first new volume of poetry in nine years from one of the world's most acclaimed poets offers works dealing with childhood memories and with the experiencing of old age, covering a range of emotions with startling power.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Is Spender (Collected Poems: 1928-1985) a major voice in poetry, or mainly a friend of various literary geniuses? The poet offers no conclusive evidence for either view in this collection of 19 poems. His subject is the past, personal and historical. The sense that the two provide a mutual context for each other permeates the poetry. Many recount early memories, such as "A First War Childhood," a narration of a soldier carrying the child Spender into a bomb shelter during World War I. In this poem, as in some others, the sentiments seem naive or curiously out of date: "I could hear his heart beat-/ With the blood of all England." As for the verse itself, it is lyrical in some places, yet burdened with trite rhyme schemes and boring iambic lines in others. One welcomes the structural departure in "Black-and-White Photography," a free-verse experiment enriched with images. A second reading of the book allows one to glimpse an impressionable persona roaming through the ruins of the past in this poetry with an almost bizarre guiding intelligence. And in "Poetes Maudits," Spender discards his romanticism and constructs a psychologically compelling profile of Rimbaud. Aside from occasional surges like this, though, Dolphins rides along on a rather unspectacular wave.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

It's a surprise to encounter a new book of poems from Spender, remembered from high school English class anthologies along with his contemporaries Auden, MacNeice, and Eliot. Yet here it is-a new, albeit slim volume of 19 crisp, new poems that bring the reader delight and nostalgia-delight in their fresh presentation and diction and nostalgia in their lingering descriptions of a lifetime of experience. It was said of Spender early in his career that he wrote of things he did not like, including himself. Madness, both world wars, growing old-all are subjects of this volume's verse, but he writes as well of the glorious inspiration of a school of dolphins: "Happy, they leap/Out of the surface/Of waves reflecting/The sun fragmented/to broken glass." Spender is edging past the gloominess and introspection of his earlier work into a newfound wholeness, a kind of ecstasy. To read these poems is to feel the profound sense of personal history of a poet who was overshadowed by his illustrious contemporaries but who emerges, ultimately, as a powerful voice that spans our century. Highly recommended.
Judy Clarence, California State Univ., Hayward
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0312112645
• ISBN 13: 9780312112646
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 46