This is a book I suddenly recalled, in Dec or 2020. I must have read it read in the 1990s or so. This is where I first came across William Carlos William's "This is Just to Say," which remains a favorite work. I think this anthology is still popular with high school English teachers, but it is also the right kind of book for poetry lovers like me. ( )

Thought I'd read it as a child (I think I skimmed it), read it again just now. It's okay, but not really my thing. I prefer light verse (Ogden Nash, A.A. Milne--I've read When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six numerous times, and they never lose their joy for me).

The kind of poetry featured in Reflections is the thoughtful, high-faluting kind, with much reliance on things as metaphors for other things. That said, I did remember the title (a shortened version of a title of the final poem), hazily, from childhood until now.

If you like poetry, this is probably an excellent collection. If, like me, you only like it when it's relatively silly & clever at the same time (hard to do!) this may not be for you.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). ( )

I first encountered this book only a few short years ago and immediately fell in love with it. Sometimes complexity of thought can be conveyed in very simple language. (For example, Summons by Robert Francis, page 54.) For me, the simplest things are usually the best. You might also enjoy its companion work, "Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle," one of my very favorite anthologies. What a diverse and wonderful selection of poems! (I loved The Stone by Paul Blackburn, page 24, especially.) ( )

A good introduction for kids/teens to poetry. I'm not sure how this could hold an adult's interest--unless the person first encountered it as a child. The book is visually appealing and does cover a variety of styles. ( )

This collection of poetry is one of the best I've encountered for young readers. The volume features poetry from poets both well-known and somewhat obscure, and offers a range of perspectives on a number of different subjects. Each of the twenty-one sections gathers poems focusing on a specific theme, ranging from family to sports to poetry itself. When read together, the poems in each of the sections provide several engaging voices and a sampling of intriguing poetic technique.

Given that this is a collection intended for younger readers, I was delighted to find that the poems increase in complexity -- both in poetic structure and in subject matter -- as the book progresses. The earlier poems are quite simple and straightforward, while poems toward the end are far more complex and challenging. In this sense, it is a teaching volume. Even thought it is not annotated and offers no suggestions for critiques or analysis, the progression of complexity challenges the reader to read more critically.

This is the collection's second edition, and it has been updated to include both greater diversity and more contemporary poetry. Having not read the first edition, I can't make any appropriate comparison, except to say that some of the selections seem a bit outdated (there's still a lot of "revolutionary" poetry from the 1970s), and it seems that there's a heavy weighting toward Latino poetry. Perhaps the editors were simply focusing on poetry from the predominant minorities in the U.S., but it seems odd to me that "diversity" is inclusion of more Latino and Asian-American poets, with little attention to poets the rest of the world over.

That said, the collection has many merits, not least of which is an apt compilation of poetry for younger readers that includes both classic favorites and some lesser-known poems. Recommended for ages seven and up.