{"id":534,"date":"2009-06-26T20:05:35","date_gmt":"2009-06-27T00:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=534"},"modified":"2009-06-26T20:05:35","modified_gmt":"2009-06-27T00:05:35","slug":"letters-to-a-stranger-by-thomas-jamesgraywolf-press-2008-originally-houghton-mifflin-1973","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/letters-to-a-stranger-by-thomas-jamesgraywolf-press-2008-originally-houghton-mifflin-1973\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters to a Stranger by Thomas JamesGraywolf Press, 2008 (originally Houghton Mifflin, 1973)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Letters to a Stranger<\/em> starts with the quiet dream-like images of “Waking Up”: “curls of dark grass,” “a lake of dark petals” (p 5). The poems continue full of quiet, full of dreams and death. There are some exquisite bits early in the book, like “a few perfect flakes of snow\/When the season is just breaking.\/They strike the water and are nothing at all” (p 14), but I wasn’t too interested in these poems at first. The blank verse felt overly mannered, the subjects too dreary. But as I kept reading there kept on being more to like: the meter started to feel like grace, like just enough rather than too much, and there kept on being gorgeous images, turns of phrase. I’m not sure how much it’s that the book really does get better as it progresses, and how much it was me becoming immersed in James’s voice and tone, seeing his work’s facets differently.<\/p>\n

I like the poems with literary or classical references, “The Moonstone,” for instance, or “Jason,” with its golden images, the wonderful line, “I learn the lion color of these hills,” (p 20), or the fairy-tale-ness\/un-fairy-tale-ness of “Frog.” Later, “Two Aunts,” with its images of the narrator’s odd prairie forebears, (“sidesaddle, gowned in lemon silk”) (p 67) is odd and wonderful, and I like bits of poems like “Wild Cherries,” lines like “June fastens everything in a silk repose.\/Lilacs have dropped their stars with little effort” (p 47), or “Peonies,” which says, of the flowers: “They are arranging themselves in a green jar\/And shatter like expensive glass\/Over an inch of cold tapwater” (p 62). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Letters to a Stranger starts with the quiet dream-like images of “Waking Up”: “curls of dark grass,” “a lake of dark petals” (p 5). The poems continue full of quiet, full of dreams and death. There are some exquisite bits early in the book, like “a few perfect flakes of snow\/When the season is just […]<\/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-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","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=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}