ALL THE POETS (MOSTLY) WHO HAVE TOUCHED ME (LIVING AND DEAD. ALL TRUE: ESPECIALLY THE LIES)
A new Book — only $10.95 (+ shipping)
by Lyn Lifshin
Paperback: 234 pages
Publisher: World Parade Books (February 26, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0984619852
ISBN-13: 978-0984619856
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
Publisher:
World Parade Books
5267 Warner Avenue # 191
Huntington Beach, CA 92649
Reviews:
I think ALL THE POETS WHO HAVE TOUCHED ME is a tremendous book along the lines of John Berryman's Dream Songs. It's the Lifshin persona with equal attention to the speaker and the subjects presented. There's a great intellect at work in the book, showing the author has digested the essence of the poets, both recent and remote, presented as flesh and blood characters, with their eccentricities and normality. It humanizes them using sound biographical knowledge but fictionalizes them, adding luster and depth. The revelations of both speaker and related poets are powerfully original but have the sense of being basically historically sound. It's an intriguing presentation that keeps the reader eager to see what's on the next page. It's scandalous and morally elevating in turn. It keeps coming back with additional observations real and imaginative. The book with its many pages and accumulation of factual and imagined information has the satisfying weight of a masterpiece, and though phrased in a perfectly conversational tone, it occasionally has the music of a hymn, sometimes a dark melody, at other times a radiance. The diction and milieu are in accord with the varied historical eras treated. The book is not just a hearty meal. It is a feast of words with fascinating descriptions and engrossing ideas. The reader will leave this banquet of literary delights fulfilled. — William Page
"Lyn Lifshin writes a moving and evocative collection of poetry that is a tribute to the poets who touched her and inspired her. Whether it is Allen Ginsberg giving her a rose, or meeting Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern, or a dreamscape of Lifshin and Emily Dickinson picking berries, Lifshin imagery and imagination is on full display... a must read!" — Doug Holder/Ibbetson Street Press
Lyn Lifshin's All The Poets is mind candy.
More than a third of the poetry affords us an entre-nous perspective of contemporary and classic poets...some dreamt of, alluded to, half known and some known intimately (but not well).
Velvetted treatments about Bly to Williams, from Beat Poets to off-beat places. Ms. Lifshin employs the witty, the anecdotal, the cathartic taut and lusty writing she is so deservedly well known for.
...Then, tucked amid the themed leaves, we meet The Ice Maiden, residing in a group of well-constructed pieces dripping with the severe, decadent and provocative qualities that have populated many of Ms. Lifshin's other collections.
All the Poets reminds the reader of just how special and important a writer Lyn Lifshin is!
— Edward Roberts
Lifshin's latest book get farther into the center of her psyche than anything else she has ever written. It essentially shows how she lived in the midst of poets living and dead, was part of the whole mystique that surrounded all of poetic aesthetics and history. William Carlos William, Frost, Bukowski, Anne Sexton...and all kinds of little personal contacts like having breakfast with Robert Bly in Normal, Illinois (of all places), a box of letters from Robert Frost to her father. She not only brings the poets themselves alive like I've never seen them brought alive before, but shows the massive, artistic context out of which her own masterpieces emerged. A classic and, in a way, for poets beginning to play the poetry game, a series of almost buddhistic meditations on roads to take into what poetic mountains and plains, what poetic rivers to glide down listening to the voices surrounding you. — Hugh Fox
For the delicious scoop and little known facts about Dylan Thomas, Garcia Lorca, James Dickey, Robert Frost, Alan Ginsberg and may more, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, you must read Lifshin's entanglement with a wild variety of the famous and infamous. I loved the book. A must read.
— G.M. Howells
Lyn Lifshin’s lively and compelling new collection offers a romp through the generations of writers, most of them fellow poets, from Byron to Dickinson to the late Jane Kenyon, as she recounts scandalous affairs, intimate friendships, thoughts of what might have been. Lifshin’s vivid imagery and wicked sense of humor (“I have ghost writers. . . ” the poet confesses as she recounts every poet’s secret writing fantasy) make All the Poets Who Have Touched Me a collection no reader of poetry should miss.
I think this is a great and imaginative piece of writing, and I look forward to seeing it in print.
— Rebecca Baggett
"…(her) punch line is often a knockout…At least some of these are poems (it can be hard to tell which, which is part of the fun) describe fantasized meetings with a famous poet: every poetry lover's daydream…. — Victor Schwartzman
from the book's forward
Lyn Lifshin writes magically about the poets who have touched her life, figuratively and literally…we, the readers, must decide if the poets actually materialized in Lifshin's world, or if, as in one poem about Dylan Thomas, they "walked right out of a poem into a dream"
-
Lyn Lifshin's poems were published in issue 4 and issue 10 of Cha
-
