Poetry Book Club: The Blue Estuaries: Poems: 1923-1968 by Louise Bogan

Each month, the Poetry Book Club meets online to discuss one must-read book of poems, whether a timeless classic or an award-winning contemporary. Led by Napa poet Kathleen Patterson, who has been an enthusiastic book club member since its beginning, meetings are open to all levels of poetry readers, both the curious and the committed.

“Behind the Bogan poems is a woman, intense, proud, strong-willed. . . . Her poems can be read and reread: they keep yielding new meanings, as all good poetry should. The ground beat of great tradition can be heard, with the necessary and subtle variations. Bogan is one of the true inheritors.” —Theodore Roethke
“Now that we can see the sweep of forty-five years' work in this collection of over a hundred poems, we can judge what a feat of character it has been. . . . [Bogan's] is a language as supple as it is accurate, dealing with things in their own tones. . . . Reading this book with delight, I was struck by a career of stubborn, individual excellence.” —William Meredith, The New York Review of Books

Honored, during the course of her literary career, with almost every major poetry award, Louise Bogan (1898-1970) was the poetry critic for The New Yorker for nearly forty years. The Blue Estuaries contains her five previous books of verse along with a section of uncollected work, fully representing a unique and distinguished contribution to modern poetry over five decades.

Books by the celebrated poet/critic Louise Bogan (1897-1970) include Body of This Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929), The Sleeping Fury (1937), Poems and New Poems (1941), Collected Poems 1923-1953 (1954), Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (1951), and Collected Poems 1923-1953 (1954). What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan 1920-1970 (1973) was edited by Ruth Limmer.

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