Check It Out! 4-12-10

Today's featured book of poetry is If I were wrtiting this by Robert Creeley. He was a wonderful poet and has a style quite approachable by anyone not familiar with poetry.

Here's a write-up from the publisher's website and a quote:

"If I were writing this was the last book of poems completed by Robert Creeley and published during his lifetime (New Directions, 2005). The words he wrote to describe this book are oddly prophetic: "Age brings experience, not wisdom; age makes time actual - each day another - until there is no more. These poems have been my company, my solace, my feelings, my heart. When they cannot speak it will all be silence." Though Creeley died in 2005, his poems are not silent - they vibrantly continue to embrace life while acknowledging, with no self-pity, the inevitability of death. The message (as he always ended his letters) is "Onward!"

The second featured book today is Subterranean Twin Cities by Greg Brick. This is a fascinating book that details the history of the system of underground caves, caverns and sewers that criss cross the Twin Cities.

Here's an article about the book and author from the Star Tribune last year. A quote:

"Greg Brick's tour of the dark caverns and damp passageways of the Twin Cities underground isn't for claustrophobic readers. Nor is it for those too squeamish to relish Brick's frequent immersions in raw sewage, his encounters with fetid air and sulfurous smells, and his meditations on the origins of the gelatinous "sewer slime" that coats the walls of St. Paul brewery cellars."