Good Poems for Hard Times

If you like the country, folksy, down-to-earth, raised-by-the-bootstraps, slow talking, sometimes seemingly lethargic, witty, sometimes self-depricating, and corny humor of Lake Wobegon, you should like this book. These are not the flowery poems written by Renaissance men. Instead, many are recently inked works by cowboys and others whose abilities and talents rival those of the great 16th or 17th centruy poets -- hence the title. This book moves well, reads easily and provides an anthology which quickly delivers you to well written English language poems. What more can your bookshelf desire?

I am so grateful to Garrison Keillor for bringing so many wonderful poems to my awareness that I might not have otherwise known, whether through his "A Writer's Almanac" on the radio or through his poetry anthologies. He has read or collected so many poems that I have come to love from poets whose work I have sought out as a result of learning about them from him. Garrison Keillor is an American treasure (sometimes a Scandinavian treasure?) and I, one among many, treasure him. This new book is a gem. I gave it to my husband for Christmas and since then have been reading aloud from it. So far, I have laughed! and I have cried! It is a marvelous collection from a wise man and it's just what we need. The Introduction alone is worth acquiring the book, but then the poems...! Thank you, Mr. Keillor.

Even if you are not one to pick up a book of poetry, you can pick up this book and enjoy it. You might open it randomly or flip through a section. You may return to a poem a few times and see what's changed. This wonderful selection of very approachable, very enjoyable poems will make you stop and say 'oh' a lot. That was my reaction to many of them. A sort of quiet, sit back in your chair kind of response as suddenly the words made something shift a bit and some universal emotion or truth is revealed. Leave this book lying around and I bet everyone will pick it up and respond to whatever page they open to. Thanks Mr. Keillor for another great selection of poems.

Really what more can be said? Every poem is a good poem- hmmm, perhaps that is why Keillor calls them... Good Poems? I am a blue collar poem reader. I don't want to understand the free form or debate why the writer used a certain word over another, I like poems that take me away to a familiar memory or experience and most of these poems do just that. It is a book best experienced by candle light with a special someone and/or a great bottle of wine. Thank you Garrison Keillor for another fantastic book of good poems.

Garrison Keillor calls his latest book of verse GOOD POEMS FOR HARD TIMES. He could just as easily have called it MORE GOOD POEMS or FURTHER GOOD POEMS since he has produced another anthology every bit as good or better than his previous GOOD POEMS. These 185 poems from 61 named poets-- there are a couple of anonymous poems and a psalm or two-- were selected from Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" radio show so they are the kind you listen to and grasp the meaning of while waiting for the light to change. These poems are meant to speak to ordinary people through what Mr. Keillor calls "the last presence of honest speech and the outspoken heart." It is worth the price of this book for Mr. Keillor's introduction alone. He opines that America is in "hard times" now with "the levels of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning," with the perversion of religion, a tax system that favors the rich, when newspapers decline and the censor abounds. He fears for a future when America has "no binding traditions," when the public cannot name senators and gets their political knowledge through television and their "only public life at Wal-Mart." He says further about what is already taking place: "You lie in a hotel bed at night, remote in hand and surf a hundred channels of television. . . and you can drift for hours among the flotsam and you will never see anything that shows that you're in Knoxville or Seattle or Santa Fe or Chicago and nobody will ever speak to you as straightforwardly and clearly as poetry does." That's pretty scary stuff. Mr. Keillor is totally democratic in his choice of writers. The qualifications for inclusion appear to be that the poet be fairly accessible on a first hearing and not long-winded so you need not look for a Pound or Eliot here. These verses are about the rubber meeting the road. There are some heavy-hitters among the poets included, i.e., the ones we read in the Norton American and English Literature anthologies: Auden, Robert Burns, E. E. Cummings, the beloved Miss Emily, Donne, Frost, Hardy, Keats, Shakespeare, Whitman et al. Also included are important modern names-- Wendell Berry, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver-- and a host of good poets I had never heard of before. (I found myself often looking up the bio of a previously unknown writer whose poem I had just been taken with.) Although I understand completely that every editor must discriminate and cannot include everybody, I would have liked included maybe a poem by Cavafy or Mark Doty or Paul McCartney. The subject matter of these poems is diverse, from 1977 Toyotas and spiral notebooks to baseball, which is not to say that many of the selections are not profound nor beautiful. One of my favorites is Charles Bukowski's "the con job," obviously about the First Gulf War where "the U. S. ground troops were largely/made up of Blacks, Mexicans and poor/whites/most o