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    Begin Again: Collected Poems
    Begin Again: Collected Poems
    Begin Again: Collected Poems
    Ebook208 pages2 hours

    Begin Again: Collected Poems

    By Grace Paley

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The collected poems--some never previously published--of one of our best-loved, most respected authors.

    Combining Grace Paley's four previous collections and new unpublished work, Begin Again traces the career of this direct, attentive, never predictable poet. Whether she describes the vicissitudes and pleasures of life in New York City or the hard beauty of her adoptive rural Vermont, whether she celebrates the blessings of friendship or protests against social injustice, her poems brim with the compassion and tough good humor that have made her stories and essays famous.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 15, 2014
    ISBN9781466875807
    Begin Again: Collected Poems
    Author

    Grace Paley

    Grace Paley (Nueva York 1922- Vermont 2007).

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    Reviews for Begin Again

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Couldn't disagree with the previous review more. Paley's collection is a gem. For a relatively modest non-telephone book-sized volume, the breadth of her work astounds. You get New York stuff. Jewish stuff. Russian immigrant vignettes. You get her radical politics, trips to Hanoi, 80s Central America and feminism. You get poems about aging parents. Then aging when it happens to you. You get marriage poems. You get mother poems. You get poems about writing. You get Vermont in fall, with a Paleyesque caveat:"I did not want to be dependent on autumnI wanted to miss it for once"If only Robert Frost had missed a New England autumn for once in his life.In "Reading the Newspapers at the Village Store" she sums up fifty years of post-War U.S. foreign policy with the phrase "mild habitual murderers." Worth the price of admission right there.
    • 2/5
      I'm afraid poetry was not her strong suit; short story writing was. These poems are certainly accessible, with no obscure literary references or awkward, stilted prose. Unfortunately, most were so lacking in depth and style, that they weren't particularly thought provoking. To me, they lacked that delicious concentration of language that immediately conjurs up images or emotions. Surely, some made me smile, and others contained wise observations, but none made my hit list to share or read again.

    Book preview

    Begin Again - Grace Paley

    I

    A woman invented fire and called it

                                                  the wheel

    Was it because the sun is round

                   I saw the round sun bleeding to sky

    And fire rolls across the field

                   from forest to treetop

    It leaps like a bike with a wild boy riding it

    oh     she said

                   see the orange wheel of heat

    light that took me from the

                   window of my mother’s home

    to home in the evening

    Stanzas: Old Age and the Conventions of Retirement Have Driven My Friends from the Work They Love

        1

    When she was young she wanted

    to sing in a bank

    a song about money

                            the lyrics of gold

    was her song

                            she dressed for it

        2

    She did good. She stood up like a

    planted flower among yellow weeds

                            turning to please the sun

                            they were all shiny

    it was known she was planted

        3

    No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children

    except to muddy or mock.

        4

    The job of hunting     of shooting in hunting season     of

    standing alone in the woods     of being an Indian

        5

    The municipal center

    the morning of anger

    the centrifugal dream

    her voice flung out on plates of rage

                            then they were put in a paper sack

                            she was sent to the china closet

                            and never came back

        6

    Every day he went out, forsaking

    wife and child

    with his black bag he accompanied

    the needle of pain as it

    sewed our lives to death

        7

    One day at work     he cried

    I am in my full powers

                            suddenly he was blind

    when slabs of time and aperture returned

    dear friend     we asked

                            what do you see

    he said     I only see what has been

                            seen already

    One day when I was a child     long

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