All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems

by Linda Gregg

Now available in paperback, the award-winning retrospective by Linda Gregg, "one of the best poets in America" (Gerald Stern)

Worlds out of time still exist.
Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering
just as the poem lasts.
In the concert of being present.
-from "Arriving"

Linda Gregg's abiding presence in American poetry for more than thirty years is a testament to the longevity of art and the spirit. All of It Singing collects the ongoing work of Gregg's career in one book, including poetry from her six previous volumes and more than twenty remarkable new poems.

All of It Singing received the 2009 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers , the 2009 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the 2009 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2009 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2008

About the author

Linda Gregg is the author of several collectios of poetry: In the Middle Distance, Things and Flesh, Chosen by the Lion, The Sacraments of Desire, Alma,Too Bright to See and All of It Singing. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She won 2006 PEN/Voelcker Award winner for Poetry and has won a Whiting Award.

Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[donnalyn ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

[edit edit] wait i have to redact a star bc there r just little traces of orientalist nonsense that make my tummy hurt.!!!!!! i did more research and i was right to have that first inkling..... >: ( I will just take what I desire & leave the rest

~~

i didn't realise i had this book sitting on my shelf from when i bulk bought everything in my holds section at the book grocer right before the store closed lmao but when i saw it was like omg :o! at the time i didn't know anything about linda gregg, i just flipped through it bc we would get like 3 poetry books a month and i was so bored at the counter and liked some of the poems now i'm like wowwow linda GREGG...(amazing intuitive taste @ past me)... i have been reading / thinking about "New York Address" a lot lately, perhaps one of the greatest poems ever ??am i allowed to say that, is that too dramatic....i will say it w my whole chest !

i just feel like every poem i've ever written has been an eternal agonising attempt to be as clean and simple as linda gregg. Her writing is so precise and intentional, not a single word is wasted, and everything feels,...eternal...one morning i hid in the kitchen and read some of her poems aloud to myself because I just had to hear it like i wanted to know how it would sound...she has the right pacing....yaknow.... in things that are just so simply put !! like "I want the large / and near, and endings more final. If it must / be winter, let it be absolutely winter." so true let it be absolutely winter... i also think this is a great collection w great choices : ) i would gift it to someone i love, someone who doesn't like poetry that much, i think it's v accessible and straight to the point right in the gut. linda gregg's writing makes me want to,, not dress up my poems in fanciness but just strip them of their clothes completely so that it is just d bones, so i know if they are good bones... if u want to die just say I WANTED TO DIE! that kinda thing. What else could you possibly say. anyway here is new york address, you must read it aloud:

The sun had just gone out
and I was walking three miles to get home.
I wanted to die.
I couldn't think of words and I had no future
and I was coming down hard on everything.
My walk was terrible.
I didn't seem to have a heart at all
and my whole past seemed filled up.
So I started answering all the questions
regardless of consequence:
Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won't speak.
No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won't love.
Yes I will bless. No I won't close. Yes I won't give.
Love is on the other side of the lake.
It is painful because the dark makes you hear
the water more. I accept all that.
And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance.
Having finished with it all, now I am not listening.
I wait for the silence to resume.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gift a book of poetry is. What gifts a book of poetry can grant us. Two years ago I was traveling in the South and browsed through an offbrand bookstore selling used and remaindered books. I passed up the copy of All of It Singing I looked through there. I bought instead the only copy of Maurice Manning's Bucolics I'd ever seen. I gushed to my daughter some nonsense about serendipity and the alignment of stars and the random intersection of book and reader. But the thought of Gregg's book, not bought, never went away. Regret took on its own authority. Months later I reread all of Jack Gilbert's poetry for the umpteenth time and longed for the Gregg I knew would help me experience more of him because I was in awe of their legendary relationship in the Aegean eons ago. I figured Linda's poetry would be pulled from the same well of perception and delicacy as Jack's. Tasting the same olives in the same rooms, feeling the same stones underfoot in this village or that, walking the same beaches, I thought, would give voice to the same shared sensitivities. In the meantime, the poet had died, and I missed her though I'd read little of her. I returned to that bookstore in April but All of It Singing was no longer there. Serendipity had bounded away and the stars had misaligned, meaning I had to order a copy. My hunch about her had been correct. She's a terrific poet herself, of course. She writes with the quiet power I admire. She's somehow unadorned yet cosmic, and she writes a poetry which spans both our world and the ancient. What she says is permanent. And yes, Jack is here. I'd thought Gregg's poetry might be similar, and it is in form, though she also keeps her distance and stays in her own head. Jack is here sometimes as a remembered love and trusted counselor. In some poems he appears as Orpheus come again to the Aegean where they spent some time together years ago.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Linda Gregg is one of those poets who has hovered at the edges of my reading life, whose work I have only happened upon, not sought. So this collection of her selected work was a wonderful deeper introduction to her. I admire her brevity, the way her poems are precise but not bogged down with detail. The clarity of her language, the magic of it. I think I could learn a lot from her. A poet I will return to again and again.

[nasti · Rating 4 out of 5]

my creative writing prof gave this to me because he said it reminded him of my writing? not sure why, i can’t really see it. but a really nice collection nonetheless!!!

“Already what I remember most is the happiness of seeing you. Having tea. Falling asleep. Waking up with you there awake in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice. I'll try to tell you better when I am stronger.”

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're wondering, "Should I read Linda Gregg's selected cover to cover?" The answer is yes.

[Dan Butterfass · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some thrilling poems throughout this collection, poems of radiance and real and mature feeling, most often made of ordinary language that belies their complexity of thought and feeling.

Two poems I absolutely loved are: "Glistening", and "The Singers Change, The Music Goes On." These are poems that I can read again and again, and always feel new with. The latter's metaphysics has a wonderful late Milosz-like strangeness. The former is just a dazzling poem about being alive in and for the body.

However, there are also just a too few many poems that strike my eye and ear, like the title itself of one of Gregg's poems, as "ordinary song" - in that the language is not quite figurative enough in order to make the meaning that Gregg is striving after, so that what is lacking (for me) is the "condition of newness" that Harold Bloom speaks to in this passage from his essay, "The Art of Reading Poetry":

"Figurations ... create meaning, which could not exist without them, and this making of meaning is largest in authentic poetry, where an excess or overflow emanates from figurative language, and brings about a condition of newness."

My only real problem with the collection is that in both form and content the poems that fall into that category of "ordinariness" all start to look and feel and sound too much the same. To be sure, the majority of Linda Gregg's poems do not offer much variation in form, from her trademark one-stanza, free-verse iambic pentameter poems that pay partiular attention to enjambment/line breaks, which are almost always energetic. The pleasure in reading such poems for me is not so much in the artistry of the work, but rather in originality of the poet's vision.

This is a book well worth reading and owning - Linda Gregg's perceptions can alter and augment consciousness.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some lovely gems in here

[Nikka · Rating 5 out of 5]

linda gregg because of what shes been through and shes still singing

[sabine · Rating 5 out of 5]

it is very rare that i read a book of poetry and i enjoy almost every piece. linda gregg the woman you were!!

[Kion You · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite poetry collection of the year

[Mitchell Capps · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finishing Jack Gilbert’s ‘The Great Fires’ and running across about of Magnolia concerning him and author Elizabeth Gilbert (the connection’s not worth pursuing) I took to reading about him on Wikipedia. That’s how I found Linda Gregg. Turns out they were in a relationship for a time. I was in the mood for more modern American poets so I ordered Li-Young Lee’s ‘Rose’ on recommendation, and this book at random. Turns out this collection is actually dedicated to Jack so that mythos continues as I read. She’s very good although you can tell (Or think you can) sometimes she is so emotionally in on a poem that she tosses precision and runs away with it. I can connect with her desire to fossilize a moment; its date, its time, its details. I connect with her embarrassing angst and her charting of insignificant moments of her exact whereabouts. Some of what she writes goes not over but past my head. I’m sure I’ll visit with her again in the future. She was a great companion for these past months.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

On my reading I gave it a two. Too confessional in a way that seems closed. After the PPE discussion, I have a better appreciation. Still too confessional and, I have to admit, "feminine" for me but there were other aspects, scenes of Greece, California, Mexico of such beauty that I could hardly read them out load. And even where I didn't care for the subject, there is no doubt about her poetic skill.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

i “finished” this a while ago but i keep picking it up to reread the same handful of poems. she is capable of being so razor sharp, so concise. ugh!

[Abbie Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Linda Gregg’s poetry, in style and theme, falls somewhere in between Mary Oliver and Anne Sexton, without quite achieving the penetrating emotion of either poet. I enjoyed about 60% of the poems in this collection, without any one of them being particularly striking or memorable.

All of it Singing is punctuated with loneliness. Or maybe aloneness would be a better word to use? Gregg’s experience of feeling alone swings on a pendulum between ecstasy and depression.

She was also deeply haunted by the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the poems in this collection which make reference to the tragedy are some of the strongest in the set.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a re-read for me, I think? Or perhaps when I last read Gregg, I had just read two of her individual collections. I'm not entirely positive. Digress.

Her work still stands as some of my favorite, so evocative and authentic. A poet whose lyric finds its way to both be representational and imaginative. The reeling between the Greek mythos and the everydayness of romance and relation are wonderful. And the lust is so apparent. I love Gregg's work, and this is no different.

[Amanda Dissinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I really liked a lot of the poems but the collection got repetitive to me. I know it’s a collection of selected poems from across her works so that’s probably why there was a lot of the same themes. There were also a lot of poems discussing and referencing mythology and the Bible, which kind of lost me. But she writes beautifully about aging, love and nature and this was my first time reading any of her work.

[Jacob MacDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

The collection form does a lot of work here, compressing the existing books and leaving the original work half-capped, half-open. There are recurring images, obsessions even, textual forms. I found the references to poetry itself as weak as they were sparse. But each labeled section hits a specific emotional note. There was nothing to hate and a few poems that blew me away, including, happily, the entry which put me onto Gregg in the first place.

[Lynn]

ETIOLOGY
Cruelty made me. Cruelty and the sweet smelling earth,
and the wet scent of bay. The heave in the rumps
of horses galloping. Heaven forbid that my body not
perish with the rest. I have smelled the rotten wood
after rain and watched maggots writhe on
dead animals. I have lifted the dead owl while it
was still warm. Heaven forbid that I should be saved.

[Catherine Wicker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linda Gregg’s poetry was amazing and honestly some of the most profound I have read. What I struggled with was this being picked poems from different books the story line did not have the follow through. I wish I had read each book individually.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Linda Gregg goes! Absolutely.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't technically read all of this yet (January 2021), but I've read a bunch of it and keep it by the bed. Beautiful. Funny that no one turned me on to her earlier.

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning, revelatory, everything I needed and more. Life-changing.

[Will Haslam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like meditating on the flowers growing in a graveyard.

[Sungyena · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Harmonize in the silence of myself with their unimportance: their elegant, unimportant happiness.”

“I sing to lessen the suffering, but i also sing to inhabit this abundance.”

[Eduardo Cárdenas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had seen a few of Linda Gregg’s poems in different places before, and I was curious to read a full anthology from her. Her poetry is always accessible, melancholic, but somehow still optimistic. In this collection there is literally a poem praising how beautiful her ex and his lover looked while cheating on her. I particularly enjoyed the poems from her Alma book, but overall this anthology is great. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes poetry.

[Mauberley]

Returning to these poems after first reading them a couple of weeks ago, I felt much more comfortable with Gregg's subjectivity and her often elliptical discourse. The poems that I like best tend to be from 'The Sacraments of Desire', Chosen by the Lion', and 'Things and Flesh' although jewels lurk throughout. The book is dedicated to Jack Gilbert and includes as an epigraph a line from of her earlier poems ('The Defeated'): 'Waking up with you there awake/ in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice.') Many of these poems are written from from that state of rebirth, a second look at the world through eyes that have known love. A fine example of this new vision, and a favourite poem from the collection, is 'The Border Between Things'. Thank you Tony Hoagland for pointing me this way.

[Drunken_orangetree · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this collection quite a bit. Gregg is a quiet poet, and she's best when using ordinary language to talk about ordinary events.

"Thinking as I grow older I will lose/my color. Will turn tan and gray like the deer./Not one deer, but when many of them run away."

[Pramila]

I can read these poems again and again without getting bored.

[Ann Cefola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Linda Gregg is a true poet who lets her environment provide the metaphors for her emotional experience.

[gabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can barely catch my breath if that's what i'm supposed to do even though god slips blindly through i won't mind