Catching Life by the Throat: Poems from Eight Great Poets

by Josephine Hart

Overview

This one-of-a-kind anthology, including an audio CD, brings eight great English-language poets to life.

Catching Life by the Throat unites the sound, sense, and sensibility that lie at the heart of great poetry. It features eight great poets, with brief, accessible essays concerning their life and work and a selection of their poems, and it is accompanied by an 80-minute CD recorded live at the British Library: Ralph Fiennes reading Auden, Edward Fox reading Eliot, Roger Moore reading Kipling, Harold Pinter reading Larkin, and more. Whether you believe (like Robert Frost, who inspired the title) that poetry is a way of “taking life by the throat” or (like T. S. Eliot) that it “is one person talking to another,” nobody does it better than the poets featured in this book. For a novice discovering the rich heritage of English-language verse or a seasoned poetry reader, Catching Life by the Throat is an extraordinary introduction to eight iconic poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393066074
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/17/2008
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	829,429
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Josephine Hart (1942 - 2011) was the author of five novels, including Damage, Sin, and The Reconstructionist. She began hosting the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library in 2004.

Editorial Reviews

Clearly, theater producer and novelist Hart (Damage) loves poetry. In the 1980s she founded Gallery Poets, where leading British actors gave readings of classic poems; this well-received program later evolved into the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library. Hart firmly believes that poetry is the highest form of human expression and that it must be heard and not simply read to be fully appreciated. That is why the CD accompanying this anthology-with Ralph Fiennes, Juliet Stevenson, and other actors reading 28 of the 60 poems-is as integral to Hart's purpose as the text itself, which features works by W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Maryanne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and William Butler Yeats. Hart prefaces the selected poems-ranging from Yeats's "The Pity of Love" to Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"-with brief but thoughtful biographical sketches and observations. Readers and listeners alike will be left wanting even more. For most public and academic libraries.
—Anthony Pucci

Library Journal