Lawrence Booths Book of Visions – Yale Series of Younger Poets

I purchased this book for an end-of-semester project at my university, and it is always refreshing when the assignments from class end up match up with what I do for fun so it doesn’t even feel like I’m doing homework. I had also wanted to read more poetry, and I think that this book does a really good job of showing the different forms that poetry is capable of assuming. Oftentimes, poetry is simply thought of as short, beautiful, rhyming lines grouped together to form a sensory description of a thing or idea. However, poetry as never meant to be put into a box, and this book serves as an excellent refresher as to why. Manning guides the reader through a chaotic landscape that I think came straight from his dreams, and various descriptions of this world from equally as chaotic points of view. Breaking up some of the poems, and adding to the overall sense of discontinuity and randomness in Lawrence Booth’s mind/world, are proofs similar to those in geometry classes explaining the protagonist’s view on the world. The proofs show that Booth has an extremely different view of the world than a coherent person would have, and with that knowledge it is easier to jump down the rabbit hole with Manning into a world that resembles our own in just enough ways to feel familiar but so different that in the end I am left wondering if the same laws of physics would even apply in this world.

The book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions by Maurice Manning, was his first collection of poems and it later won the Yale Younger Poets Award. It was chosen because Manning’s poems are experimental and break the norm of traditional poetry. Instead of having separate poems, all of the poems in this book go together to tell a story.This collection focuses on a man named Lawrence Booth who lives in the deep south. The language very much reflects that. Each poem is a different part of the story. Most of the time they are not in chronological order, but the way he organized it really works. It starts out normal, then it starts to build up. He saves the biggest poems/ parts of the story for last.There are other key characters in the story, including: Black Damon, Lawrence's very good friend, Missionary Woman, who Lawrence eventually falls in love with and marrys, and Mad Daddy, Lawrence’s dad that serves as the bad guy in this story. In fact, most of the characters that are so negatively described in this book are father figures.The book is titled Book of Visions which is very accurate not only because it is showing separate visions (or parts) of one big story, but because Manning is an expert at setting a scene. When you read his poetry it is so clear in your mind, it is as if you are having a vision.Overall, I usually do not read poetry, but I was surprised at how I ended up enjoying this book.

A magnificent book of poems that won the Yale University's prestigious award to a first book of poems. The author, Maurice Manning , has gone on to write several more books, very different and all superb.

Sent wrong format and now I’ve missed the return date. Ugh. It’s in cassette, who has cassette any more? I wanted and selected hard copy book

Solid. As described.