Wherever Home Begins: 100 Contemporary Poems - Hardcover

Grade 8 Up-Everything from strewn litter to last season's maple leaves can remind one of "home," wherever that may be. But even the title of Janeczko's latest anthology is telling-through these poems readers learn not where home is, but where it begins. That sense of home is at the heart of these tightly rendered, carefully selected, and thoughtfully arranged selections. Some reminiscences are pleasant, warm, and joyful. Others express the cynicism, dismay, or discomfort of remembering the past. All are well crafted and quite mature in viewpoint. The material things that make a home-porches, closets, and country roads-are well visited, as are the faces and memories. Here is a dirty service station, a graveyard, disappearing farms, and even a Polish post office. These diverse locales fit the universal theme of the book and, as he usually does, Janeczko skillfully organizes the volume to reap the most impact from each poem. Once again, he has collected gems from around the world, representing the best of contemporary poetry. His experience and trained eye and ear deliver nothing less than unqualified realism. Both the painful and joyous memories and definitions of home offer this volume its power.
Sharon Korbeck, Waupaca Area Public Library, WI
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 8^-12. There's always a strong sense of place in Janeczko's fine anthologies that introduce YAs to contemporary poetry. Here, home is the explicit theme, and once again, Janeczko brings us powerful poems of small-town America: casual, immediate, precise images of lonely cafes and empty streets at dusk and drifters from disappearing small farms. Several voices are of older people looking back to a more innocent time ("It was really quiet at night" ). Home is also the city, of course, often a littered "lost river of hell," but sometimes a dancing, magical center ("hot city, hot blooming" ). The poems are loosely organized into small units about farms, mines, hills, beaches, workplaces, etc.; a few are set outside the U.S., and one moving poem is about a border cafe in Arizona. "On the Back Porch" evokes a warm and rooted place ("Inside my house are those who love me" ), but mostly we glimpse a solitary road with people far from home. Hazel Rochman