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Poetry recommendations


Isalie

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Hi

I'm looking for some poetry to read with my 8th graders. The themes should be friendship, love or evil, any of the three, and if it's a classic that's good and if it's good that's even better.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!

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Almost 20 years ago I got a Dover pbck "Best remembered poems" edited and annotated by Martin Gardner. This is not an edition by a professor of English (and has no "older stuff" like Shakespeare, Donne or Pope) but a very nice overview about fairly popular classics, mostly from the 19th and early 20th century and it was helpful and entertaining for someone with English as a second language. (I cannot be more specific with recommendations for the topics you mentioned.)

ASIN: B007S6IJJS

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Morri Creech

This is his poem "Broken Glass" from his first collection of poety Paper Cathedrals:

https://books.google.com/books?id=1buC2_iGuloC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=morri+creech+broken+glass&source=bl&ots=ACnRXen9zw&sig=9dD33uuSnIZ6T84qwkDeSElpydI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjF6YfPq7jKAhUCHh4KHWujD8AQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=morri%20creech%20broken%20glass&f=false

He was a Pulitzer prize finalist for third book of poetry The Sleep of Reason In 2014.  It's really amazing stuff. :)

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Since I can't edit the doggone thing here's the poem in full:



Broken Glass:


In 1970 my father returned


to the sweetness of desolation,


wandering past rows of mobile homes,


past the hulls of cars


splayed in the wheatgrass


that whiskered their silent engines,


past the skeletons of stripped machines,


dismantled harrows,


to the pine grove where shattered glass


gleamed beneath a bed of straw needles.


I had never been there before,


never seen the blazing fragments,


small as I was,


with a handful of rocks in my pocket


for the moment when my father


lined the bottles like years


against a rotten stump


and reared back to hurl the first stone.


I had never seen him raise his hand


against the world. But the emptied bottles


of bourbon and scuppernong wine


flashed beneath the trees,


and he burned to splinter them all


to a heap of slivers. He pitched the curve,


the fastball, the slider, the knuckle.


He left nothing intact, that man whose life


was an arrangement of tools


hung in a garage


for repairing bush hogs and cultivators;


his mind whirled


beyond the gears of perfect machinery,


and he reveled in the dust


and gravity of human error,


shouting as he threw each stone


with all the rage he could muster.


Feet planted firm,


he ground the pitcher's mound dirt into his palms,


rubbed them together,


then wound up the side-wind


and fractured the barrier


between him and the weeds


springing up around the dead-rooted pine,


chanting the names of his heroes,


those faded figures


from the box of trading cards in his closet,


chanting them in the language


of failure, oblivious to me


standing next to him, silent and afraid--


until at last he grew tired,


hefted me onto his shoulders,


and headed back


toward the O-rings and gaskets


that required his attention,


back toward his ordered life,


leaving the wreckage


behind him, scattered and shining.[/quote]

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  • 3 weeks later...

If you can get a copy of The Dragon Book of Verse, it was originally a school poetry textbook (can you imagine?!) and is perfect for that age. Poems are divided into eight categories: mystery, landscape, sea, I forget the rest. Try to get the original which was first published in 1977, although the 2000 edition might be fine too; I just don't know it.

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