CAROLINE KENNEDY READS FROM SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY
◆ 7:30 tonight
◆ Barnes and Noble, 55 Old Orchard Center, Skokie, IL.
Caroline Kennedy’s She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems (Voice, $24.99) has been compared to a vase filled with flowers. With poems carefully picked by Kennedy and arranged into sections that go through the phases of a woman’s life, the book is a lyrical exploration of love and life, friendship, marriage, motherhood, work, joy, grief, middle age and growing old. Indeed, images of flowers grace the cover, end papers and pages. Each section is eloquently introduced by Kennedy, providing rare insights into the heart and mind of one of the most private members of the famous family.
The range of poets and styles is richly varied, and includes Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christopher Marlowe, Rudyard Kipling, Queen Elizabeth I, W.H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, W. B. Yeats, Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop and Gwendolyn Brooks.
“In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life,” Kennedy was quoted as saying in an interview Tuesday at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. “They’re short, they’re intense. The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can’t understand it or that it will be boring. So I tried to pick poems that I responded to, and hopefully others will, too.”
Poetry has been important in the Kennedy family, the finding and sharing of poems with family members. Kennedy traces the tradition to her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and notes “obviously my father cared a lot about words and language and ideas and how to express them, and invited Robert Frost to the inauguration, which we just celebrated the 50th anniversary of."
The process of gathering poems for this book began when Kennedy turned 50 in 2007, and this collection is an outgrowth of prior works that contained poems from her childhood and family.
No comments:
Post a Comment