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I Am: The Selected Poetry of John Clare Ed. by Jonathan Bate Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $14.00 Speaking of maniacs, here's a new edition of John Clare. Poor, uneducated, beset with one dire tragedy after another, in and out of asylums, Clare satisfies all of the "mad poet" criteria. Including the poems. Besides the famous anthology pieces like "The Badger" and "I Am," Clare wrote an abundance of the best sort of nature poetry, wherein a mind is both moored in and maddened by the world's weird intimate otherness. He tended toward very erratic punctuation and grammar, which gives a breakneck urgency to the poems. A lot of that, stylistically at least, has been lost from this volume, which has been tidied up to make the poems more "accessible." An admirable goal, perhaps, but we prefer the unmediated maniac. Buy this book Amazon Barnes and Noble Book Sense |
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