everything by Larrick looks good, collections and criticisms alike
.................................
Unfortunately this turned out to be a simple collection of other people's poems, none of Larrick's. ?áThe photos are dated - this is from 1974 and it looks exactly like the pulp 'newsmagazine' leaflets we read in school?á(Jr. High)?áback then. ?áWell-intentioned, to respect and guide young people's minds in their quests for deeper meanings, kind of thing. ?á

Most of these poems left me cold. ?áThis William Stafford dude got a lot of his works included, but they were, imo, the weakest. ?áI did like:

Finding a Poem by Eve Merriam, in which she compares creating poetry to forging a path up a mountain.?á you can never duplicate the first climb/ every time is the first anew."

A Campfire and Ants by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, also metaphorical, " some sort of power drew them back, in the abandoned home! -- and there were many of those who again ran onto the burning log, rushed along it and perished there."

But those are not really about open space, are they?

Well, there's How Everything Happens (Based on a Study of the Wave) by May Swenson. ?áConcrete poetry designed to look like waves advancing and receding, both a keen observation of what waves actually look like as opposed to the icons they've become, and also metaphor for 'everything.'

I quite like the first half of the first verse of The Mockingbird by Randall Jarrell: ?á"Look one way and the sun is going down,/ Look the other and the moon is rising./... The bats squeak, "Night is here;" the birds cheep, "Day is gone." ?áBut that is still more metaphor than exploration of open spaces....

Finally, in a fragment from Walt Whitman, we get a bit of something special that is part metaphor but mostly authentically what it's about: ?á"Solitary the thrush,/ The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,/ Sings by himself a song."

Ok, to be fair, probably all the poems I didn't like included some that satisfied the promise of the title. ?áBut I didn't like them; they weren't very good. ?á'Nuff said.




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