After the Dream Poems: 2009-2011

After the Dream Poems: 2009-2011
Author: Thomas Porky McDonald
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2020-02-13
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1728347211

The eighth five-book collection of poetry by poet and writer Thomas Porky McDonald, After the Dream: Poems 2009-2011, brings the author even closer to home than in his previous work, with a thought to where the world is headed. The title poems for each of the five books in the mix, Born in the City, The Class of No Return, Touched by Life, Back to Astoria and What Lies Ahead, all speak of a man still searching to incorporate his early life into the realities of the 21st Century. Other notable pieces from each collection include “Friendships to Eternity,” “Together One, as Always” (City), “While the Leaves Blew,” “Always too Old to Change Anything” (Class), “When the Game Simply Took You Away,” “I’ve Never Forgotten About Friendship” (Life), “Scenes From a Lost Neighborhood,” “When Fear Overrides Our Humanity” (Astoria), “Needed in the Land of the Needy” and “A Glimpse of Bernadine” (Ahead). A solid entry from the still wandering and wondering balladeer.

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Author: Wendy Cope
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 74
Release: 2010-07-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0571259413

When Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was first published, it catapulted its author into the bestseller lists and established her as one of our funniest and most eloquent poets. There are so many kinds of awful men - One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead. (from 'Rondeau Redoublé')

The Dream Songs

The Dream Songs
Author: John Berryman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2014-10-21
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466879637

The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever were John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of oems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: "if he had a hundred years," Henry despairs in "Dream Song 29," "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good." This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.

Break the Glass

Break the Glass
Author: Jean Valentine
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2013-07-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1619320142

"As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."—Library Journal In her eleventh collection—honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—Jean Valentine characteristically weds a moral imperative to imaginative and linguistic leaps and bounds. Whether writing elegies, meditations on aging, or an extended homage to Lucy, the earliest known hominid, the pared-down compactness of her tone and vision reveals a singular voice in American poetry. As Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine's work, "This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way." From "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them": At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and damp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking if they had any heaters. They had one heater. You are ill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream. * Can you breathe all right? Break the glass shout break the glass force the room break the thread Open the music behind the glass . . . Jean Valentine, a former State Poet of New York, earned a National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Poet in the Parks

Poet in the Parks
Author: Thomas Porky McDonald
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 774
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1665528796

After going to various states on the Major League landscape over 21 seasons, poet/writer Thomas Porky McDonald came upon the notion of continuing to tour the rest of the contiguous United States, using Minor League parks as a starting point. A pair of Western tours with his niece Jaclyn and her son Alex, as well as a stop in Graceland with his sister Patti, would be in the mix, with each stop bringing out more of McDonald’s signature poetry. Poet in the Parks is a sequel of sorts, as the earliest trips chronicled feature returns to Major League parks with his Poet in the Grandstand road partner, Adam Boneker, who later hits the Minors trail with McDonald, as well as a stop in New Orleans during the time of a World Pandemic. Ultimately, this second travel/poetry volume is merely a quest to savor the American landscape, no matter how many cities, states, parks and places of interest you pass through along the way.

Dancing the Dream

Dancing the Dream
Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1992
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385403682

This title contains Michael Jackson's personal writings and over 100 photographs, drawings, and paintings from his own collection. The book is a personal view of the world around us and the universe within each of us.

Porkwalk

Porkwalk
Author: Thomas Porky McDonald
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1665501839

Having packaged his more than 3,100 poems in chronological and themed collections, poet & writer Thomas Porky McDonald had the idea of putting together a volume of some relevant pieces that feature his lifetime home of Queens, New York. On addition, Porkwalk: The Queens Collection utilizes the same formula that McDonald chose in a previous collection based on his 20 years working out of neighboring Brooklyn, Dem Poems: The Brooklyn Collection. The 364 poems contained in this book are divided into sections, with old friends, his Astoria neighborhood, baseball and the losses he has suffered in the mix. This collection brings the poet back to where it all began and is thus arguably the most important one to date.

And These Thy Gifts

And These Thy Gifts
Author: Thomas Porky McDonald
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2015-04-21
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 150490625X

The seventh collection of poetry to be released by Thomas Porky McDonald, And These Thy Gifts: Poems 20072009, contains another five-book set of unique material. In Theresa, Red and Serenity, the self-styled ramble poet began an arc that would permeate throughout the entire volume. Pieces like God through the Lens of a Kaleidoscope, You Wonder Where Were At, and These Thereafters all spoke of the current world, in relation to a world that once was. Where is My Spy? and Irish Girls in Waiting cited friends McDonald had made in his two decades working in NYC Transit, and Incident on Blake Street, Inside the Crawford Grill, and Is Heaven Such a Place? touched on the ballpark. In book two, Contemplating Farewell, the collection amps up, as the impending demise of Shea Stadium and the sudden loss of a dear childhood friend take center stage. I Wonder About Yesterday and A Final Opened, Indeed honor Roy Riegel, who passed away on Opening Day of the 2008 baseball season, and The Lights of Skillman, A Ramp Overlooking Ecstasy, and In 73 all looked back at Shea, even as it still hung on for dear life. Whispering to Heaven, the third book of the set, used a trip to Los Angeles (Risin Mojo on the Diamond, The Night the 70s Returned and When Nothing Turns Up Differently), Anaheim (The Boater Battalion, A Rubys Diner Monday) and San Francisco (Where Were Without Willie, The Known at Polo Guy) to lead up to the final days of the old yard in Queens (Sittin in the Greens). In the last two books of the collection, On the Steps With You and The Wonder of the Silver Wander, the final days of Shea and the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the first black U.S. President offer up the most evocative images. The Planes Weep Openly, And So the Fade Begins, The Sound of Hope and Another Tuesday (Steps) and The Seats that Have Come Home Again, Agee and Jones, From 16 to 44 and Whistle Stops (Wander) offer up the best of these. All in all, And These Thy Gifts: Poems 2007-2009, might well be McDonalds most reflective volume yet.

Vespers at Sunset

Vespers at Sunset
Author: Thomas Porky McDonald
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2010-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1452042659

The sixth collection of poetry to be released by Thomas Porky McDonald, Vespers at Sunset: Poems 2005-200 7 sees the poet alternately reaching back and looking forward, with the usual five-book format along For The ride. Up first is the Fat Parrot Diaries, a volume which contains a number of reflective pieces, like "Deuce" and "47," about Frank Brady, a friend whom McDonald has alluded to often in the past. The passing of Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks inspired the impassioned verse "The Buses Won't Be Running in Heaven Tonight" And The growing specter of aging exballplayers spurred the longing ode "As Those Years Deplete the Roster." Diaries is complemented by its immediately succeeding set, Drfling Shadows, whose title piece contains lasting images also seen in both "Lookin' Out Mikey's Window" and "A Vision of Kirby," written for an old friend and a baseball icon, respectively. The present is even more in evidence in Shadows, with a country visit ("At Lackawanna," and "The Life Goes on and On") and a Midwest trip ("The Guy From Midwood," "The Other Side of the Street") supplying the muse. In the Alley brings the poet back to New York, As the day-to-day ("The Room That Con Ed Missed"), The great beyond ("Till the Canyons Evolving Are Done") And The most evil day of all ("At 8:45") each pitch a tent. As always, baseball is well represented, with the city of Baltimore ("Legends House," "Ripken County") providing the latest stop on the tour. Alley also contains thoughts of impending doom ("A Feeling, As Yet Unknown") and Eternal gratefulness ("Those Who Set You Free"), balanced by a seminal classic ("A Time"). The final two books of Vespers are Frankie Rules, a book centered on the memory of Brady ("Frankie's Cure," "Frankie's Sport," Frankie's Heart And The title piece), and Old Phenoms, where the soon to be razed Shea Stadium ("The Space Beyond 1' Street," "Queries to an Usher on Doomsday") stands astride a pair of more personal farewells ("The Bond of the Eternal Souls," "The Window on the Second Floor"). Another representative collection from the kid from Queens.