September 1, 2001
The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis have been selected by someone who should know: Caroline Kennedy. While Caroline's two confirmed appearances on the Today Show, a first serial in Good Housekeeping, and further publicity should make this easily the bestselling poetry title of the season, it doesn't hurt that Jackie's taste was excellent. Charming poems from John Clare, Kipling, and a young Jimmy Kennedy are complemented by work from Langston Hughes, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop and by 14 b&w family photos. Caroline Kennedy has organized more than 100 poems into seven sections ("America"; "Adventure" etc.), written short, intimate introductions to each and included a small selection of Jackie's own poems.
August 1, 2001
Her daughter offers a selection of the late former First Lady's favorite poems, plus a few of her mother's own verses, which, she allows, it would have embarrassed her mother to see in print. Surely she wouldn't have been embarrassed about her daughter's inclusion of three paragraphs from a book for children in which famous people wrote about their favorite childhood reading. The snippet encourages writing as well as reading "the great writers" and names several poets whose work, naturally enough, appears in these pages--Frost, Poe, Dickinson, Cullen, Cummings, Sandburg, Sassoon, and Belloc. Shakespeare, the King James Version, Homer, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, Hughes, and Bishop are among the other sources drawn upon for sections entitled "America," "First Poems," "Adventure," "Escape," "Romance and Love," and "Reflection." If the chestnut count is high, so is the quality, and the few surprises, such as Jean Toomer's "Brown River, Smile," are knockouts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)