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Recommendations!
absurdabsurd:
I fell morbidly in love with Wilfred Owen's war poetry a few years ago. Those were words that sent chills straight through me. Yeah, a bit more recent, a bit less elaborate language-wise, but evocative nonetheless.
Also, Rainer Maria Rilke's Panther remains one of the most striking poems I have ever read. All the translations I've ever seen lose the pacing, tense rhythm of the original German, but not the beauty of the image.
Robert Frost is cool as well. For some reason, he always brings up pictures in my head that could be taken from the pages of some magical storybook.
What do people think of Sylvia Plath? I've had times when I've read her poems and hated them for how purposefully obtuse she attempts to be, and then other times I've found lines that almost had me in tears and I still can't decide if I like her or not. Also, years and years ago a boy handed me a book of Sylvia Plath poems with an inscription next to Moonrise, saying that was the poem that symbolized me to him. I still don't know what to make of that.
Uber Ritter:
I too have really liked what I've read of Wilfred Owen.
Inlander:
--- Quote from: Uber Ritter on 09 Apr 2008, 22:14 ---I really like TS Eliot.
--- End quote ---
Eliot's poetry is just too perfect for my liking. I prefer my art to have a few more rough edges - to be a bit more human and a bit less robotic. I love William Carlos Williams, for instance.
If people like Wilfred Owen's war poems, they should read Siegfried Sassoon's as well.
One of my favourite poets is John Clare. He wrote at the beginning of the industrial revolution in England, and he was something of an "outsider" poet, as he lived and was raised in the countryside (by illiterate parents, if I'm not mistaken) rather than coming from the literary set in London. He was very popular for a while, and his poetry was generally very simple: incredibly minutely observed vignettes of rural life, or of animals, or nature scenes, and also a lot of beautiful love poems. Tragically, the industrial revolution pretty much killed off the rural way of life he'd grown up with and loved, and a lot of the formerly public land became private and fenced off (he wrote an amazing poem about this called "the Lament of Swordy Well"). Whether as a consequence of all this or because it was just always in him, he ended up going mad and was institutionalised: he became delusional, adopting various personae at different times and believing that he was married to a woman he'd been in love with as a young man (when, in fact, they'd been forced apart and he had married somebody else). But the incredible thing about Clare is that even through this period he not only continued to write poetry, but that poetry was the most extraordinarily gentle and tender poetry you could imagine. His poetry is a wonderful and amazing example of the power of art to pierce through the darkest times in a person's life, and to provide just a little bit of hope in life.
Ikrik:
--- Quote from: peacetokengy on 24 Mar 2008, 11:58 ---Books: Kurt Vonnegut books are always good! And also Mein Kampf, A clockwork Orange, uh....I am America (and so can you).
my recommended movies: Eraserhead, Gummo, Repo Man, and A clockwork Orange.
--- End quote ---
Oh dude...you did NOT just recommend Mein Kampf. I am the only person I know who owns and has read through the book. Trust me, it's not worth it. The writing itself is only ok, the ideas aren't....well-developed. There's nothing insightful in it, he wrote it before he became the Fuhrer....and it's really....bad.
ANYTHING by John Steinbeck is amazing. Read Of Mice and Men or Cannery Row before you start Grapes of Wrath. They're quite short so if you enjoy the writing style then you'll love Grapes of Wrath. Don Quioxite is exquisite, I'm about 300 pages in, it's something that you just have to plow through and read for a couple of months. Instead of recommending Lolita I'll recommend Pale Fire by Nabakov. The Road, No Country for Old Men, All The Pretty Horses are all by Cormac McCarthy and are ALL amazing, depending on if you like his style. If you want to get Vonnegut I'd recommend Timequake, Slaughterhouse Five, and Galapagos My final recommendation will be my favourite book in a long time. Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Oh..pick up some Kakfa too.
Dimmukane:
I second the Kafka. Good stuff.
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