Good Poems for Hard Times

this is a wonderful anthology...no surprise, look who put it together. I loved visiting places in my past as well as stops along the road. I have given this as a gift to rave reviews from the receiver. Joan Stevenson

An excellent collection of poems by poets you know and many you don't know. I have initiated a poetry group where I live and am using this collection as a lift-off for the group. Thank you Garrison Keillor!

I like the selection of poems - down to earth poetry for everyone, even those who don't think they like poetry. Speaks to everyone. Not intellectual poetry. Modern day poems in free verse - not verse of yesteryear.

This is a very good compilation of poetry. As with most of Garrison Keillor's books, the voices selected are different, fresh and interesting. The pieces are generally not ones people are familiar with, so it is interesting and enjoyable.

Garrison Keillor has an uncommon ability to select poetry that inspires the mind by creating accessible images that speak to the reader more than the usual turgid poetry. I thoroughly enjoyed his selections even though I do not share his religious leanings (about 5 % have Christian references). The poems he chooses have universal appeal.

The book is great.
The packaging was not.
No protective plastic wrapping..could see the exposed books through the corners of the cardboard box.
Had there been rain or snow on the delivery day (very likely, in New England, in the winter), the books would have been damaged.

Kindle Edition: While the printed book is quite good, the kindle version is low quality and not worth the price (or 10% of it). The book is divided by searchable chapters according to categories. That is it. There is no way of finding a specific poem. Even poem title index in the back of the book is a simple text rendering of the index that lack page numbers and has no hyperlinks to the poems listed there. So if you want to read a poem (say "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, pg 222) you need to look it up in the print book, find out what chapter it's in and where it's at within that chapter (about the 12th poem in chapter 9) . Then go to the kindle chapter and swipe your way to the desired poem. That's an OK work around for a public domain title, not for a full-ticket item.

Buy the paper copy instead.

I bought this book for my father, who loves poetry and Garrison Keillor. The poems are organized by theme, which makes it easy to navigate when in the mood for a particular type of poem. He travels with it to use for meditation in his hotel rooms.

This is a wonderful collection of poems for any time, not just hard times. I purchased it to use in my classroom for high school ESOL- poetry is very accessible for those still learning the language.

Hats off to Garrison Keillor for promoting poetry with these collections. This one is really lovely. My husband and I will just pick it up in the mornings and read each other a poem. You will find some old favorites and some new delights. Thank you Garrison!

It is very strange. The Kindle edition of Good Poems for Hard Times is impeccably formatted. This book, in contrast, is haphazardly arranged. A title may appear on one page; its poem, on the next. Poems are randomly broken. The table of contents is useless. If this were a physical book, then I'd return it -- I shouldn't need to; no publisher would print a book this way.

What makes it bewildering is the excellence of the companion volume's format. Perhaps it is too early in the history of ebooks for a consumer to hope for consistency.

Purchase Good Poems for Hard Times in paperback. Spare yourself the annoyance of this awkward digital volume.

I guess you need to examine books carefully that come from the store--this one came missing 33 pages at the end (420-453) I spotted this too late to return--one doesn't exactly rip through an anthology of poetry
I could return this laboriously for only a partial refund--since 30 days has expired apparently
Pretty disappointing--does the store not have basic quality control on what they ship?
If not this surely is not a great place to buy a book

This book was purchased for my daughter for school. She passed this course, so other than that, I cannot really review this book. I personally enjoy Garrison Keillor, and would've liked to see this book come back home!

This is a richly varied collection of poems beautifully introduced by that unflappably unhip Minnesota man of letters, Garrison Keillor. The Good Poems were an insistently “non-gift” this holiday season from a dear friend who had spoken of Keillor’s touching introduction months earlier.

In these days when identities and laptops and high-tech gizmos are the preferred swag of the modern thief, there is something reassuringly story-worthy about Keillor’s tale of walking with trepidation out of Dayton’s with the Oxford Anthology of Verse stuffed into his jacket, and reveling later in the pleasure of poetry reading, which he’d deemed worth risking “arrest, prosecution, shame to his family, the end of college hopes, and the beginning of a lifetime of menial jobs”.

The Times-Picayune claimed that this collection of 185 poems would be their choice if they could give only one book to every inhabitant of post-Katrina New Orleans. I don’t have to explain; if poetry touches you, you will put this on your list. If it does not, there are probably no words of mine that could tempt you to open the door.

Keillor’s tastes are satisfyingly wide-ranging. You’ll find Walt Whitman, W.H. Auden, John Berryman, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Thomas Hardy, among many others, in this tactile ragged-paged volume.

During the holiday season, I’ve opened this book at random, and read aloud whatever page fell open. My favorite so far is a poem about a cat that is also about so much more than a cat.

You’ll find your own favorites.

An interesting division of poems, although at times the poems within the section didn't quite reflect the respective section title.

An anthology containing some poems I couldn't relate to, some good poems and some beautiful poems, outstanding in their simplicity and imagery, such as "When one has lived a long time alone" by Galway Kinnell (echoed with mysticism); "Rain Travel" by WS Merwin (vivid imagery of lying awake listening to the night time rain) and "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry (expressing a deeply spiritual communion with nature) were particular favourites.

A nice addition to my poetry collection.

If you are a poetry afficiando and avid consumer, you may want to pass this one up, but for the rest of us, those trying for the second or third time to find an entre into the land of poetry, I recommend this book highly. Here's why:

To me poetry is like jazz: some of it is really transcendent, moving, just great. But you have to sift through an awful lot of is noise to get to it at times. Similarly with poetry, there seems to be a lot of The Emperor's New Clothes out there.

So what you have here is a twice-filtered selection of poems: Selected once to be on the Writer's Almanac, and selected a second time by followers who took the time to contact WA and say that a particular poem meant something to them. The poems are segregated topically, and I promise you won't like them all, but the signal-to-noise ratio on this collection is higher than any other collection I have.

You also get Garrison Keillor, the editor. I thought the introductory remarks were superb, and I equally enjoyed the editorial/biographical remarks in the back. I guess to relegate the remarks to the back was the right choice-- keeps from being a distraction-- but it does result in a fair amount of page flipping if you are curious like me.

I picked my copy up as a part of a sale deal, meaning I may very well not have picked it up otherwise. I am very glad I did; the book has been given me man hours of pleasure, and will in the future as well. It also introduced me to the Writer's Almanac online, which I have also enjoyed.