Finally, my COLLECTED POEMS got a review, the first (except for a couple of brief newspaper notices)---current issue of the National Review (not my favorite mag, but no worse on the right than Nation is on the left, & probably better), by someone whose name I forget. Not a particularly accurate or well-done review, but favorable. I have been rescued briefly from oblivion. |
Anyone who has not acquired a copy of the Collected Works of our most senior member is nuts. Listen up, you free and formal versers, this guy wrote the BOOK.
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Let me second Tim's endorsement. From the poems of <u>The Lovemaker</u> to "Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925)," Bob has almost never written a poem not worth deep study and even outright reverence. (He might disagree, perhaps, but I hope not, because he would be wrong on that one point.)
And I can also say that he is one of the few teachers, of poetry or anything else, that one inevitably learns something important from, regardless of one's state of mind or receptivity. About this, I can speak first hand, having been one of his students, and more receptive than I knew, though probably not the best student. (He first taught me when I was an undergraduate longer ago than either of us probably want to recall.) Moreover, Bob is the best person in the world to learn to read poetry aloud from. If you have never heard him read his work, or the work of other poets he loves, your life as an appreciator of the spoken word is incomplete. It's been a bit over twenty years since I learned that. And the effect is universal, as more recent experience proves: I watched a room of over a hundred people, stacked knee to knee and covering the floor, in a reading to commemorate Wallace Stevens, hushed to pindrop silence by his reading (the first public one, I think) of "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words: A Cento." Robert Hass was also on the program, and may have drawn the crowd, but people hubbubed and chitchatted while Hass mangled unprepared minds and muddled his way through a silly lecture that essentially identified Stevens as only a precursor to Hass. But Bob Mezey hypnotized the buggers into that sane and serious space he keeps alive in the world, along with his wicked sense of humor, delivering a tribute to Stevens that was, if anything, better than most of Stevens. (Certainly Bob is better reader than Stevens ever was: check the recordings of Stevens, then listen to Bob.) |
Amazon, as usual, is badly organized (I had to search fifteen listings before I found it) but there is a listing, with a couple more reviews (one posted twice):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...641662-1977444 But both of these reviews were also positive. If Tim or anyone else who's read a copy wanted to add reviews.... I'm off to read more of the excerpts. Kevin |
Alas, I've never heard Bob Mezey read, and had the pleasure of his good company only once and briefly. But I do have the enduring and profound pleasure of his Collected, which strikes me as the most varied poetry collection on my shelves. It's not one "voice," but a much more natural expression: all the many voices that one keen intelligence is capable of, speaking in every imaginable mood and tone about the world--not inside, but outside, where things happen. Wonderful book, wonderful mind.
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Bob
Belated congratulations on your review and the book itself! I wish I could get it without ordering it on the net, because packages are often stolen here. Would the book fit in a standard mailbox? Might it be in any shops? Terese |
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