Michael Waters (1)

This was a mixed bag. Many of the poems were about or in praise of films I am not familiar with. This hindered my reading experience a bit. The standouts tended to deal with film more generally. I have sought out collections by two poets, Sonia Greenfield and Gregory Djanikian, so I’ll count that as a win. Definitely recommend it for someone who’s more of a film buff than I am.

Parthenopi New and Selected Poems by Michael Waters is a poetic treat. A diverse collection of poems many of which deal with loss with a touch of eroticism.. Anyone that reads a collection of poetry will have poems that they like and ones the dislike. The evaluation comes in the weighting of the favorite poems and those that are forgettable. This collections weighs heavily on the favorites side.

Waters is one of those contemporary, bearded white guy poets with a mullet/Barry Gibb hair-do. That shouldn't make me judge his poetry, but it does.

The variety of subjects is dazzling, from movie stars to bit players, from B-movies to Bollywood, from Clark Gable to Jean Cocteau. More than a hundred poets riff on their movie memories: Langston Hughes and John Updike on the theaters of their youth, Jack Kerouac and Robert Lowell on Harpo Marx, Sharon Olds on Marilyn Monroe, Louise Erdrich on John Wayne, May Swenson on the James Bond films, Terrance Hayes on early Black cinema, Maxine Kumin on Casablanca, and Richard Wilbur on The Prisoner show more of Zenda. Orson Welles, Leni Riefenstahl, and Ingmar Bergman share the spotlight with Shirley Temple, King Kong, and Carmen Miranda; Bonnie and Clyde and Ridley Scott with Roshomon, Hitchcock, and Bresson. In Reel Verse, one of our oldest art forms pays loving homage to one of our newest—the thrilling art of cinema. (source: Knopf DoubleDay Publishing) show less