The Collected Poems (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Renowned as a novelist, Reynolds Price has written poetry through most of a career that spans four decades. His deep understanding of the poetry of John Milton, on whom he has regularly offered a course during every year of his long tenure at Duke University, is evident in his complex and controlled meter, in the auditory qualities of his language, in the eloquence with which he captures ordinary speech, and in the luxuriance of his subject matter.

Obvious, also, are the strong controlling poetic protocols and verbal economies of Emily Dickinson, whose influence he acknowledges in his preface, and the guiding hand of W. H. Auden, his professor at Oxford University, where Price was a Rhodes Scholar in the 1950’s.

Many of the more than three hundred poems collected here are set in Price’s native North Carolina, where he has spent most of his life. He records reminiscences, friendships, triumphs, losses, disappointments, and the threat of death that overhung him when a spinal cancer almost killed him and has, for nearly two decades, caused his paraplegia.

When Price strays outside his native locale, it is to commemorate such figures as Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Leontyne Price, Samuel Barber, Stephen Spender, or James Dean. Price devotes other poems to such biblical, mythical, and historic figures as Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Dionysus, Aprhrodite, Hermes, and Socrates.

Throughout this volume, Price’s verse is simultaneously lyrical and metrically complex. His imagery is consistently sharp and fresh, his insights pure and profound. His narrative poetry recalls his prose in its ability visually to frame memorable settings and capture the language of the people who populate his poems.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIII, May 1, 1997, p. 1475.

Library Journal. CXXII, April, 1997, p. 98.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLIV, May 26, 1997, p. 81.

Southern Living. XXXII, August, 1997, p. 94.

The Southern Review. XXXIII, Autumn, 1997, p. 853.

The Virginia Quarterly Review. LXXIII, Autumn, 1997, p. 138.