My first taste was Borrowed names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie, and Their Daughters, by Jeannine Atkins. All three women were born in 1867, a fact that surprised me because I had associated Laura Ingalls with much more ancient times, although if I had paid attention I would have recognized historical events that identified things more precisely. To put me in my place, I asked my niece when she thought the Little House books were set; she guessed the 1950's. You know, back when Gramma was single and dinosaurs roamed the earth.The book was great; it was fascinating to see the world through the daughters of these famous women, but I didn't feel the poems added much to the book. Many of them felt more like prose with short lines; only a few had that elusive sense of poetry. I also was frustrated sometimes by not knowing what was real and what was imagined by Atkins. I was left with a desire to know more about all six women, mothers and daughters, but without adding anything new to my poetry notebook. C+ (although I would have given it a B+ as a work of nonfiction instead of poetry)
My definition of poetry comes from a poem by Eleanor Farjeon, which is in my notebook:
What is Poetry? Who Knows?
Not a rose, but the scent of the rose;
Not the sky, but the light in the sky;
Not the fly, but the gleam of the fly;
Not the sea, but the sound of the sea;
Not myself, but what makes me
See, hear, and feel something that prose
Cannot: and what it is, who knows?
(Eleanor Farjeon)
, moves back from the frontier to focus on the son of Captain Azarcon. His actual son with his wife, not any of the men or boys serving him on his battle ship that he treats with paternalistic concern. Ryan has only rarely seen his father, with the absences from regular deployments exaggerated by the relativistic effects of the speed the space ships travel.
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