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Summary
Summary
This collection of poems by E. E. Cummings explores all the terrains of love, lust, romance and seduction. Accompanied by the electrifying art work of Christopher Myers, this is the token for readers of all ages to share with their loved one or the one the intend to seduce!
Author Notes
A Harvard University graduate, e e cummings lived in Greenwich Village and spent his summers on a farm in New Hampshire. He was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While working for the American Red Cross in France in 1917, cummings was mistakenly imprisoned for several months. This experience resulted in the publication of a novel, The Enormous Room (1922). Although he went on to write other prose, it is for his poetry that he is best known. He also published plays, wrote a ballet, and was a respected painter. He was awarded many honors for his work, including the 1958 Bollingen Prize for poetry and the National Book Award in 1955.
Although he used many techniques to stress his meaning, he wrote about the traditional subjects of love, nature, and the corrupting influence of materialism. cummings delivered lectures while at Harvard in 1952; in that same year, he was awarded an honorary seat as a guest professor. He also wrote the delightful commentaries for the 50 photographs in Adventures in Value by his wife, Marion Morehouse, a fine and sensitive photographer
cummings died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire at the Memorial Hospital. His cremated remains were buried in Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory in Boston.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-Myers has assembled a collection of 19 love poems that reflects cummings at his playful, inventive best. They include "since feeling is first," "somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond," and "love our so right/is,all." Difficult and challenging in format, they reward careful readers with metaphysical insight. Myers's artful photographic images on painted backgrounds accompany the selections. The poem "we love each other very dearly" is illustrated with a photo of a woman's face torn in half and arranged along with the text across two pages. Unfortunately, not all of the visual interpretations match cummings's elusive imagery. For the splendid "open your heart:/i'll give you a treasure/of tiniest world/a piece of forever with," the artist crafts an innocuous image of a young man with a bit of sky inserted into his open mouth. The fairly adult connotations of "may i feel said he/(i'll squeal said she" are disconcertingly paired with two fresh-faced teens. Myers's attempt to make these poems accessible to a new generation is admirable, but these lovely and challenging works defy easy definitions.-Marilyn Taniguchi, Beverly Hills Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this astonishing picture book about sensual love, Myers (Black Cat) combines evocative photographs of people and paintings to create collages that match the startling imagery in cummings's poems. Focusing primarily on the kind of breathless love for which "feeling is first," and a lover can render "death and forever with each breathing," the intense poems are made even more powerful by Myers's brilliant artwork. Each illustration translates the emotions behind cummings's quicksilver metaphors into unforgettable visual imagery. A description of the separation of lovers that "whittles life to eternity/ -after which our separating selves become museums/ filled with skillfully stuffed memories" takes visual form with an arresting image of a person's bare back and shoulders covered with butterflies. Myers unifies the book thematically with repeating images. "Birds who are the secret of living" appear in one poem, escaping a door that covers a young man's heart; and in another, creamy doves circle a nude woman to "cover her briefness in singing/ close her with intricate faint birds." However, despite its formatting as a picture book and its listing as appropriate for "all ages," the book's emphasis upon erotic love makes it more suitable for sophisticated teens and adults than for children-especially the inclusion of a bantering seduction poem-"but it's life said he/ but your wife said she/ .../ (cccome? said he/ ummm said she)." All ages. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
These verbally and visually inventive poems revel in the many guises of love, including lust and seduction. YA readers may not comprehend every poem, but that's almost beside the point--the sensual language conveys a joyful awareness of sex and love. Combined with painted backgrounds, the suggestive but never explicit photo collages play with form in ways that complement the poems' imagery. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
This perfectly gorgeous offering pairs a selection of cummings's love poetry with startling photo collages. Cummings, never one of the easiest poets, is here playful, erotic, inscrutable and utterly, thoroughly tender by turns. His signature lower-case lines, punctuated by parenthetical phrases that deconstruct and reconstruct meaning: "you will go(kiss me / down into your memory and / a memory and memory / i)kiss me(will go)." Myers's illustrations take the images offered by the poems and give them glorious color, figuring a multicultural (and often little-clad) cast against brightly painted backgrounds and using negative space to layer shapes over and under others. For the most part, he rightly chooses to aim at the overall emotional impact rather than literal depictions, giving the words and reader space to imagine. Disingenuously labeled "all ages" by the publisher, this collection will most appropriately find its home with teens, if they can overcome the picture-bookness of the whole. Those who do will find their burnings and yearnings well-understood by both author and artist. (Picture book/poetry. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 9-12. With beautiful, clear, full-color images that combine big photos and cut-paper images, Myers presents the love poetry of e. e. cummings to a teen readership. Never literal versions of the words, the pictures express romance, lust, longing, joy, sorrow, and all their combinations. Most memorable is the full-page view of butterflies on a young man's back, accompanied by a poem about remembering the power of love's intense fragility (nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands ). True to the poetry, the magical realism in the art is wild--an airplane flying in a smiling boy's open mouth; a naked woman discreetly covered with cut-paper birds in flight; a young man dressed in a business suit soaring above the words of a poem. Two happy teens, head to head, talk sex (may I touch said he / how much said she / a lot said he / why not said she ). The young, multiracial cast dreaming of love will bring the poetry close, especially for Valentine's Day. --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2005 Booklist
