The Poem I Turn To by Jason Shinder

Rating: 2.1.4
Recommended audience: Teen to adult
Category: Poetry
Review:


This isn't the kind of book that I would normally read because I'm not really interested in poetry, but I'm glad to have it. I received this as a review copy and it's taken me a few weeks to review it because I can't just sit down with a book of poetry and read. Here's the information that the publisher has given for this book on their website:

Cinema has been influencing and inspiring our country’s poets almost since its inception a century ago. Hundreds of poets have written about movies including Delmore Schwartz on Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kerouac on Harpo Marx and Maya Angelou on Gone With The Wind, among many others.

At the same time, movie actors and directors have been influenced and inspired by poets and poetry, if not writing it themselves. The Poem I Turn To: Actors & Directors Present Poetry That Inspires Them represents the best loved poems by celebrated American movie actors and directors, along with their notes and comments describing how those poems, or poetry in general, has affected their lives. The included audio CD features Hollywood personalities reading their chosen works.

On the included audio CD, hear Hollywood present their favorite poems:

• Alan Arkin reads Rilke’s “The Man Watching”
• John Lithgow reads W. B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle at Innisfree”
• Michael O’Keefe reads Ezra Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro”
• Mary Louise Parker reads Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole”
• Lili Taylor reads Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
...and many more!

What I really like about this collection is the diversity of the poems. It's nice to have some well-known, classic poets like Robert Frost, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Keats and Shakespeare along with other poets whose names I recognize like Maya Angelou, Shel Silverstein, and Seamus Haney plus so many more all in one book.

If you like poetry this is probably a great book for you. Even if you're someone like me who would like to like poetry but you don't know where to start, I think this could be a good starting place. The cd that is included is also very good. How could it not be good? These are actors, reading their favorite poems.

Note: You may have noticed on my content rating that profanity is a 4 rating. That is for one poem chosen by Carrie Fisher that has two f-words in it. Other than that this a wonderful, tasteful collection of poems.