First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them

By: Carmela Ciuraru

Book Overview

When Carmela Ciuraru asked her favorite poets to write about the poems that first inspired them, she was astonished by the illuminating responses she received. In turn, readers will be delighted by... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684864398
• ISBN13: 9780684864396
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.7" x 5.6"

Customer Reviews

A neat idea and a neat little book

Simply a series of short essays in which poets comment on the poems that first awakened them to poetry. Fortunately, the poets seem to have felt no need to be "poetic" in their essays, which are all fairly straightforward and insightful. The poems themselves are, of course, included as well. It's interesting to see the diversity of poems that others have found meaningful and to hear their explanations as to why: Two selected "Jabberwocky" to my mild surprise, while another selected "Suzane Takes You Down" and another selected a Rodgers & Hammerstein lyric. Others selected more obscure poems that I find it hard to believe anyone would regard as meaningful, but that's the charm of this book. The one who selected "For a Dead Kitten" ("How could this small body hold / So immense a thing as Death?") is my new Favorite Poet, even though I've never heard of her or read anything she's written.

Wonderful Anthology

Poetry can be inspiring, uplifting and daunting. This book, however, takes a tack which will inform even the most casual poetry reader. Editor Carmen Ciuraru asked writers to name the poem which inspired them to write -- so, in this handy volume, you get a short essay about a poem and then get a chance to read the poem itself. It includes a wide range of poets and poetic forms, from Yeats and Dickinson to Rilke and Williams. It's also fairly easy to read because you can select certain essays to read in one sitting. This is a perfect book for those who think they like poetry and don't exactly know where to start.

"A startling, inspirational anthology..."

Ciuraru asks 68 well-known poets, "What poem has haunted you, provoked you, obsessed you, made you want to speak back to it?" In response, each writer provides one example and a short essay. The results are at once magical and mundane[...] FIRST LOVES--intense, unsentimental--is a startling, inspirational anthology. -Ken Tucker

"Moving and intimate...an unassailable anthology..."

From BOSTON REVIEW:First Loves [is] a moving and intimate testimony... Ciuraru's anthology is a kiss of many valences, from the skyrockets of John Donne's "The Flea," (Billy Collins' pick) to the expansive playfulness of Wallace Stevens' "The Man on the Dump," (James Tate's pick) to the cultural fulchrum of Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole," (Eavan Boland's pick). And while it is impossible to typify the works collected here, the poem that perhaps most epitomizes the spirit of First Loves is Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky," a work of ebullient music and diction which perches on the edge of apprehension.  It's this fertile territory of "knowing before understanding" that many of the writers revisit, parsing the moment out in prose which is deeply considered, flush and inspiring.  In returning these poets to the source of their obsession, Ms. Ciuraru has managed the welcome trick of culling together an unassailable anthology. Page after page of guileless enthusiasm is, sooner or later, contagious, recommending First Loves to new readers of verse and the critically sophisticated alike.  For while the poems featured in this collection are (by frequent concession) uneven in quality, so too (by frequent concession) is first love.  It can be awkward and fumbling, but for these poets it is also the maiden scrape with the world that will define them.  Beneath the celebratory tone of these essays is the powerful undercurrent of self-recognition. -Sam White

Honest, thought-provoking and endlessly lovely

This is a beautiful book. I heard a reading by several of the poets in First Loves read at Three Lives in NYC, and the room was transfixed. This book will open up so many doors to poems you may not have read, or read in years. Then it will make you think of the first time you fell in love with a poem, and eventually you'll be thinking about the first time you fell in love with a piece of music, a piece of art, and so on. Thanks to Carmella Ciuraru for conceiving of this wonderful collection, and to the poets for their honesty.