{"id":185,"date":"2008-05-25T08:40:14","date_gmt":"2008-05-25T13:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=185"},"modified":"2008-05-25T08:40:14","modified_gmt":"2008-05-25T13:40:14","slug":"fidelity-by-grace-paleyfarrar-straus-and-giroux-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/fidelity-by-grace-paleyfarrar-straus-and-giroux-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Fidelity by Grace PaleyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like Grace Paley’s poems, how conversational they are, and how the best ones are full of a strong voice, or a sense of place. I like the way her New York poems, like the one on page 15, which begins “a new york city man is,” are perfectly observed city-moments, this one a man smiling at a fireman as the poem’s narrator sits in a cab stuck in traffic, smiling at the man, or “Bravery on Tenth Street,” about an elderly couple slowly making their way down the sidewalk. I like the wry sweetness and tenderness of her love poems, like the one on page 29, which ends “I remember you were always delicious.” “Suddenly there’s Poughkeepsie”<\/a> is perhaps my favorite poem in the book, the motion of it, the delight; “my heart leaps up when I behold,” (a tribute to Wordsworth’s poetics & joy) is a close second, for the same reasons, a similar groundedness in place, though in this one it’s Vermont, not New York. Much of this book is about age, aging, the approach of death: one poem talks about parents growing older, “furiously saying goodbye,” and there’s something of that here, though with more gentleness (p. 72). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like Grace Paley’s poems, how conversational they are, and how the best ones are full of a strong voice, or a sense of place. I like the way her New York poems, like the one on page 15, which begins “a new york city man is,” are perfectly observed city-moments, this one a man […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}