{"id":29318,"date":"2021-12-10T13:28:10","date_gmt":"2021-12-10T19:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=29318"},"modified":"2021-12-09T18:30:07","modified_gmt":"2021-12-10T00:30:07","slug":"book-report-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow-by-mary-worley-gunn-1974","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/10\/book-report-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow-by-mary-worley-gunn-1974\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: At the End of the Rainbow<\/i> by Mary Worley Gunn (1974)"},"content":{"rendered":"![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/attheendoftherainbow.jpg\")
Now this is what you would expect of good grandmother poetry. The book, comb-bound when I was but two years old (but not by my grandmother) runs 94 pages on high-quality cardstock for the most part. It touches on themes of holidays, religion (lightly), family, and patriotism, but not unalloyed with a touch of pain (apparently, she lost a son in World War II). We get the gamut of history in the poems: She married in 1918, in the shadow of World War I, lost a son in World War II, and wonders about kids these days in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
The poems are tidy little bits with end rhymes; the introduction says that the author had pieces published in the newspaper; I remember when newspapers published poetry. I will have to admit, of all the papers I take these days, only one drops in a poem from time to time, and of all the magazines I take (which, to be honest, is fewer than the newspapers), only one or two have a poem from time to time. But in the olden days of the last century, gentle reader, you might get your little ditty in the paper, read by people, enjoyed a bit and mostly forgotten. Unlike today, where you pump the poem into a database somewhere to be eventually discarded with a click of a No button instead of a nice form letter, and even if you get it published in a proper place, only other poets will read it.<\/p>\n
You know, that’s why I read grandmother poetry and old Ideals<\/em> magazines. Because I remember when poetry like this was a staple of the people<\/em> and not The Poets and Power. 1974, maybe 1980, might have been the high mark of this; by the time I was dropping chapbooks in 1994 and 1995, nobody at the coffeeshops was buying.<\/p>\nCompare and contrast: Although you can get a print-on-not-much-demand copy of Coffee House Memories<\/em> on Amazon, you can actually order a print copy of this book on Amazon. Unrequited<\/em> and Deep Blue Shadows<\/em>, my laid-out-and-printed-at-Kinko’s chapbooks, are not available.<\/p>\nOr maybe that’s because they’re more collectible<\/em>.<\/p>\nI get a little money if you click here and buy: