All That Mighty Heart: London Poems

by Lisa Russ Spaar (Editor)

Lisa Russ Spaar has assembled a collection of poems about London to appeal to most the student abroad for a semester, the armchair traveler, or the most critical reader of poetry. The book conveys a sense that London, as both city and text, is a place of exile and transplantation, a protean site of history, projection, culture, and personal drama. The collection includes poems written over a five-hundred-year period and represents nearly twenty different languages and cultures, resulting in a distinctive gathering that gives voice to the classic, the contemporary, and everything in-between. In these pages readers will find the familiar voices of Wordsworth, Blake, Dryden, and Lawrence as well as those less well known but not less resonant--Patience Agbabi, Talvikki Ansel, Rachel Castelete, and Steve Gehrke, to name but a few. Spaar successfully integrates these old and new voices by grouping the poems thematically, using the elements of water, earth, fire, and air. The structure has helped to create not only a collection of superior quality but also one that is (not unlike the city itself) greater than the sum of its parts. This slim volume of provocative and beautiful poems makes London accessible anywhere, be it from a carry-on bag or a bedside table. It is ideal for anyone in love with or hoping to fall in love with London, in all its complexity.

Genres: Poetry

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2008

About the author

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012), and Orexia (Persea, 2017). She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems, and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, was published by Drunken Boat Media in 2013. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, an All University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and the 2013-2014 Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, Boston Review, Blackbird, IMAGE, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and quarterlies, and her commentaries and columns about poetry appear regularly or are forthcoming in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing, and has taught at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Seattle Pacific University, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. --Poetry Foundation