The Time Traveler

by Joyce Carol Oates

Poems deal with travel, nature, mortality, language, social life, art, religion, aging, and the past

Genres: Poetry

131 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 1989

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Colby E · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d never read anything else by Joyce Carol Oates but I do hope I take to her other works a little better. I did enjoy a few of these but I think the selections and their arrangement didn’t flow very well for me. Maybe I just don’t get poems, though.

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don’t connect with this collection of poems. This is the first bit of writing I’ve read by Joyce Carol Oates- I hope her other work is more engaging. I just bought We Are the Mulvaneys, so perhaps her poetry just isn’t for me.

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my cup of tea. Only liked 1 of the poems & only a few others were ok, but I could appreciate her skill in creating a mood or mental picture even if they didn't appeal to me

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce Carol Oates, The Time Traveler (Dutton, 1990)

As I've said, the defining feature of a work by Joyce Carol Oates (if there is a single defining feature) is its darkness, its relentless feeling of ominousness. Imagine my surprise, then, to come across the second section of The Time Traveler, which consists partially of ekphrastic poetry (poetry inspired by paintings or other works of art in a different medium) and partially of nature poems. It shook my foundations, not only because it's such a different style for Oates to be working in, but because the quality of the work is so high; one almost wonders, if this stuff is so good, what a piece of chick lit, or other unrelenting fluff, by Oates would read like.

The other three sections of the book are what one would expect from Oates, and subject to all the same picks and pans from my review of Women Whose Lives Are Food... (except that she stays away from the political more here; more gems, less naked political whining), but this second section is a whole other ballgame, and well worth the price of admission on its own. When Oates does the nature poetry thing, her work deserves comparison to that great yardstick of twentieth-century American nature poetry, Hayden Carruth, and it stands up well.

"Morning?--opaque
and dream-muddled.
And outside our windows
the snow is madly churned
as if by heraldic beasts--
not seven or eight starving deer,
all does."
("New Jersey White-Tailed Deer")

Absolutely lovely. It's stuff like this that makes reading poetry a pleasure. Would that there were more of it in the world. ****

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

there aren't too many books of poetry that reach the billy collins level. this one is the closest i could find. everyone tells me to read mary oliver. "not as good as billy collins," they say, "but close." well, i say to them, "here you go. not as good as billy collins, but even closer than mary oliver."

[Nicolas · Rating 2 out of 5]

With a few exceptions, the poems in this collection didn't stand out to me as strong as some of JCO's other poetic works.

Podcast spotlight on Joyce Carol Oates: https://soundcloud.com/allthebooks/ep...

[Clickety · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one's on the hold shelf for me at the library.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 O119t 1989

[Abe Fabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book because it contains the prose-poem "Nighthawks: 1942" which I read in high school. Ms. Oates clearly has a deft hand with language.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5-4 ... can't decide! But it was good!

[lex]

too many favorite lines to choose