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Hunt
John Dixon Hunt
ISBN: 9780192141965
Format: Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
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From Chaucer to the present day, this anthology covers a variety of topics - the formal garden to small domestic ones, gardeners, weeds, manure, fruit, vegetables and flowers, and gardens as clandestine meeting places. John Dixon Hunt also wrote "The Figure in the Landscape" and "Garden and Grove".
There have been poems about gardens for as long as there have been gardens. Gardens have been all things to all men and women: paradoxical sites of pleasure and pain, of safety and danger, art and nature, public spaces and private retreats, places of physical labour and metaphysical reflection. This diversity and versatility have always attracted poets, whose repertory of garden themes on the page matches what garden makers have achieved on the ground. In this anthology successive historical periods of gardening - from enclosed garden and landscape park to Victorian flower-garden and modern patio - are mirrored in verse from the Middle Ages to the present day. While poets have eagerly seized upon the metaphorical associations gardens inspire, they have also been attracted to the opportunities they offer for description, both romantic and robust. As well as being microcosms of society, either perfectly maintained or ill-kempt and overrun, where love can blossom alongside the flowers, or withering and decay may presage death, they are sites of real human labour. The gardener is here celebrated as much as his creation, as are his mundane tasks of weeding and making compost, mowing lawns and tending the allotment. In his Introduction John Dixon Hunt identifies certain themes that recur throughout a selection that ranges from Chaucer to Pope, Marvell to Tennyson, Coleridge to Fleur Adcock, W. B. Yeats to Anthony Hecht, and Rudyard Kipling to Anne Sexton. Particularly fertile in modern examples, this anthology is a riot of literary talent to match the most abundant of gardens.
| ISBN | 0192141961 | | DEWEY edition | DC20 | | ISBN13 | 9780192141965
(What's this?) | | Pages | 378 | | Publisher | Oxford University Press | | Volumes | 1 | | Imprint | Oxford University Press | | Weight (grammes) | 613 | | Format | Paperback | | Published in | Oxford | | Publication date | 25 Mar 1993 | | Height (mm) | 216 | | Non-book description | xxxvii341 | | Width (mm) | 138 | | Library of Congress | 92032260 | | Spine width (mm) | 25 | | DEWEY | 821.008036 | | Academic level | Professional / Scholarly |
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| | | Introduction | | | | 1 | | Genesis 2:8-10 by King James Bible (1611) | | 1 | | 2 | | Song of Solomon 4:12-16 by King James Bible (1611) | | 1 | | 3 | | from The Parliament of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400) | | 1 | | 4 | | from The Romance of the Rose by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400) | | 3 | | 5 | | from The Complaint of the Black Knight by John Lydgate (?1370-1449) | | 5 | | 6 | | I Have a New Garden by Anonymous | | 7 | | 7 | | from The King's Quair by James I of Scotland (1394-1437) | | 8 | | 8 | | from The Feat of Gardening by John Gardner (mid-15th cent.) | | 9 | | 10 | | from The Assembly of Ladies by Anonymous | | 11 | | 11 | | from The Pastime of Pleasure by Stephen Hawes (?1475-1511) | | 12 | | 12 | | The Garden by Nicholas Grimald (?1519-?1562) | | 13 | | 13 | | from A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry by Thomas Tusser (?1524-1580) | | 14 | | 14 | | Gascoigne's Gardenings by George Gascoigne (1534-1577) | | 15 | | 15 | | 'In a chair in the same garden ...' by George Gascoigne (1534-1577) | | 17 | | 16 | | The Bower of Bliss by Edmund Spenser (?1552-1599) | | 17 | | 17 | | The Garden of Adonis by Edmund Spenser (?1552-1599) | | 21 | | 18 | | Of his Mistress by Henry Constable (1562-1613) | | 26 | | 19 | | from Du Bartas his Divine Weeks and Works by Josuah Sylvester (1563-1618) | | 26 | | 20 | | The Garden by Josuah Sylvester (1563-1618) | | 29 | | 21 | | from Richard II by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) | | 29 | | 22 | | from The Description of Cookham by Aemilia Lanyer (?1569-1645) | | 30 | | | More... | | |
"During long months of cold, blustery weather or springtime days filled with anticipation, this wonderful, rich stockpile of poems will render a treasury of garden images. It will not only supply the imagination with all the sensory delights and sublime views of old English gardens, but also provide the more intrepid visitor to these pages with interior landscapes conjured up by contemporary masters like Octavio Paz. Culled from sources as diverse as the King James Bible and Anne Sexton, this anthology may be just what the doctor ordered for a gardener's tendinitis--a definitive respite from the reality of double-digging and the toil of weeding."--Booklist  Be the first to write a customer review
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