Skip to main content

Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden

For those of you who enjoy poetry I'm sharing this link to the poem "Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden.  The last stanza of the poem was used as an epigraph for the previously reviewed (see below) Pack Up The Moon by Anna McPartlin.  The novel's title comes from a line in the last stanza of "Funeral Blues."  I rather enjoyed the poem after I looked it up in its entirety and thought others would too.

Wystan Hughes Auden (1907-1973) was born in York, England, but later achieved U.S. citizenship.  In addition to poetry, he also wrote many prose essays and reviews on a variety of themes that he also addressed in verse.  He was also involved in performance art and documentaries.  After teaching stints at the University of Michigan and Swarthmore College, Auden worked in Europe for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey at the close of the second World War.  Upon completing this work he returned to the U.S. where he continued his teaching career at several American universities.  Towards the end of his life Auden spent several years teaching poetry at Oxford University in England where he'd moved his winter home; he died in Vienna, Austria, where he spent summers.  [from Wikipedia]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip.  I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage.  The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it.  It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger.  Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read.  Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one.   Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment.  The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story.  It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve.  Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week.  This  particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst