Sunday Book Coveting/The Sunday Salon

It has been a long time I did a book coveting post. I thought why not do one for today's Sunday Salon post?

Book coveting is another way of adding on to our wish lists. I keep adding to my wish list from book bloggers recommendations. Yet, we need to look around. I am usually trying to find good contemporary poets. Not very easy to find. Crime fiction follows a close second. Here I go, coveting one of each:

New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland

If Yeats and Sylvia Plath had a love child, she would be Eavan Boland. Often hailed as a foremost contemporary Irish poet, she is a major world poet, as this rich collection of more than 40 years’ work attests. Like Yeats, in whose shadow all Irish poets mature, she employs a sonorous yet earthy English, often in traditional forms and heavy iambics, though more recently in free verse. Like Yeats, too, she writes of myth as well as her life, bonding ancient and modern, archetype and autobiography. Like Plath, from her earliest poems, she has made women’s lives her primary subject. Unlike Plath, she has a sturdy marriage—the subject of some of her most moving recent work. (In the eloquent “Against Love Poetry,” Boland describes a marriage that can’t be contained in tradition: “Love poetry cannot do justice to this . . . I did not find my womanhood in the servitude of custom” but in “the contradictions of a daily love.”) This book includes examples of Boland’s early, formalistic work and all of nine later volumes. Having the early, deeply Irish “War Horse” and “Famine Road” between the same covers with the resonant “Journey,” which visits the Hades of a woman’s life before modern medicine, makes this book invaluable.

The Lost Child by John Hart

Thirteen year-old Johnny Merrimon had the perfect life: a warm home and loving parents; a twin sister, Alyssa, with whom he shared an irreplaceable bond. He knew nothing of loss, until the day Alyssa vanished from the side of a lonely street. Now, a year later, Johnny finds himself isolated and alone, failed by the people he’d been taught since birth to trust. No one else believes that Alyssa is still alive, but Johnny is certain that she is---confident in a way that he can never fully explain.

Determined to find his sister, Johnny risks everything to explore the dark side of his hometown. It is a desperate, terrifying search, but Johnny is not as alone as he might think. Detective Clyde Hunt has never stopped looking for Alyssa either, and he has a soft spot for Johnny. He watches over the boy and tries to keep him safe, but when Johnny uncovers a dangerous lead and vows to follow it, Hunt has no choice but to intervene.

Then a second child goes missing . . .