Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #106156 in Books
• Published on: 1993-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140586954
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
This volume combines two previous collections of Carroll's poetry, Living at the Movies and The Book of Nods , with several recent unpublished works.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Two new entries in the "Penguin Poets" series examine poetry at its most modish on both coasts. Carroll's East Coast disjunctive poems and hard urban prose "nods" are kinetic and ebullient. A selection of 20 years of his work overlays the worlds of Al Bundy and Hieronymus Bosch: "The shower of black infants across the infected landscape" dissolves into "the disappearance of boundaries/ on a sea, filthy and darkened with bodies." One is captivated by the imagery ("bloodstained sombreros") that depicts the "post-meltdown" nature of anxiety but disappointed that life as seen from New York City streets offers so little compassion. Lacking O'Hara's reckless sense of longing or Ashbery's wise allusiveness, these works are recommended for those who enjoy contemporary urban poetry. Shorn of the music of the Grateful Dead (he is the group's "primary lyricist"), Hunter's narrow-lined West Coast light verse has a childlike intensity. He celebrates "a beatific bebop vision": San Francisco, poetry, and the need for freedom. "Weaponed with words," Hunter's poetic consciousness is both bizarre and commonplace (e.g., "a tongue of swords" explodes "the pus sac of deep profanity"). Suggesting a blend of the Partridge Family and Allen Ginsberg, Hunter has a frame of reference of never-never land pseudomysticism ("Tantric ecstasy," "Magus of Thebes"), lost happiness, and sappy nuggets of wisdom. Like his "Sonnets in Stone," Hunter's lyrics are "primitive with punctuation, grieving for/ long-lost loves of the future, restless and/ ill-amused." Recommended for young readers and high school creative writing classes.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
At 22, Carroll, already acclaimed for his Basketball Diaries, published his first collection of poems, Living at the Movies (1973), written in a brand of free verse at once hallucinatory and sharply focused. Touching, disturbing, and deeply personal, Carroll mines Catholic symbolism and mean-street and drug imagery with poignant intensity. In The Book of Nods (1985), his second collection, prose poems paying an acknowledged debt to Rimbaud depict urgent desperation in New York City and California. Penguin here combines Carroll's two earlier collections with some more recent poems and a vignette titled "Calvin's Charm." Meanwhile, Carroll is also known for three rock 'n' roll albums. Benjamin Segedin

Customer Reviews

beautiful
this book is incredible. "to the secret poets of kansas" is by far one of the most wonderful poemsi have ever read. i encourage anyone who is looking for poetry to read and savor these poems, they are certainly worth it.

RIVETING AND DEEP, LEAVES YOU STUNNED
Jim Carroll is by far one of my favorite poets. He sees so much deeper than most people. The words and even fonts he uses sucks you in and you feel as though you have been transported to another world. I first got interested in his poetry when I saw "The Basketball Diaries" with Leonardo DiCaprio, and the poetry made the movie even more powerful than it already was. I left the theatre stunned. I then went to a reading of Carroll's poetry at Seton Hall University, and was fortunate enough to meet him. He is an amazing guy. The poems are deep and their power and emotion pervade your body so that you can never forget them. People think that becuse Carroll writes modern poetry, that his poems are trash. That is certainly the opposite of what they are, and I think that his poems are more interesting than poets who write the lovey-dovey, rhyming type stuff. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to be swept away in the urban-like poetry of today.

It is very real. It tells of life. IT IS GREAT!!!!
This book is a must have for teenagers. Jim Carrol describes the pain and suffering that he has gone through very beautifully. He is able to compute messages throughout his poems. What makes it even better is that you know that he has been through all of that past with drugs, and he has come back as a improved person. His poems show this.