THE VOICE OF THE POET

A remarkable series of audiobooks, featuring distinguished twentieth-century American poets reading from their own work. A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliograohy, and commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of The Yale Review.

"To hear a poem spoken in the voice of the person who wrote it is not only to witness the rising of words off the page and into the air, but to experience an aural reenactment of exactly what the poet must have heard, if only internally, during the act of composition. THE VOICE OF THE POET recordings deliver these pleasures as they broadcast the pitch and timbre of many of the major voices in twentieth-century poetry."--Billy Collins, U.S,. Poet Lauerate.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) once said that his ambition was to write one or two poems that were hard to get rid of. Indeed, by the end of his long life he had written some of the immortal classics of American poetry. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Mending Wall," "The Road Not Taken," "Birches," "Desert Places," "The Gift Outright," and so many others--all of them on this recording, sometimes in versions not previously made public--are a part of the American imagination, even helped to define that imagination. Their loping lines, close to the accents of real speech yet modulated into a memorable music, have made their way into the hearts of generations of readers. Though he posed as the Yankee cracker-barrel philosopher, actually Frost was a canny moralist, haunted by the emotional scars in his own life and by the extravagance and indifference of the natural world. Each of us, he knew, is an isolated soul, adrift in a vast cold faith. Few poets have written more engagingly about the facts of rural life and landscape, or explored the terms of our spiritual condition with more wisdom. When Frost was born Walt Whitman was still writing, and when he died the Beat poets were in full cry. Robert Frost spanned the century, evading fashion, striking out in traditional ways to discover anew how men and women live with their lots.