I just picked this book up a couple weeks ago at Hooked on Books, and I brought it up to my bedroom to be the book of poetry I read before bed. Actually, I already had one of those, Pindar’s odes, but I wanted something a little lighter in case I did not want to read six pages of poorly footnoted 2500-year-old name-checks. So now my upstairs dresser, the one by the chair under the lamp, not the book accumulation point dresser, often has two books of poetry on it: The book I’m reading, and the book that I’m reading because the book I’m reading is kinda long and I’ve run out of steam on it momentarily. (The chairside book accumulation point has this progression nested deeply, where I’m reading a western and a business self-help book because I lost momentum on The Space Trilogy because I lost steam on the second book of The Story of Civilization which was to be a little light reading while I await the urge to continue with Pamela–and I think there are a couple of other long-suffering books in there.)
At any rate, this is a gift book circa 1980. Something you’d give to a friend, or something that your great-grandmother would give to a friend. Idealsesque with illustrations, paragraphs of prose, and a mix of poetry from then-contemporary light poets and some of the heavy weights from the classics. I mean, it’s a nice book, a nice bit to read a couple of poems from before bed. And I cannot help but contrast it with the gift books that would come within the decade, where paperbacks took over and got smaller and cutesy.
These books are catnip to me, which is why I pick them up when they’re on the buck cart or sight unseen in bundles at the library book sale. And any Ideals magazines themselves that I can spot in the wild, which is not that many these days and in southwest Missouri.
