Overview

""What is poetry? Poetry is art made with words. The rest of this book is about what that means."" Speak Like Rain goes through the artistic tools of poetry: sound elements of language, and images. It covers all of the basics (meter, rhyme, sonnets, metaphor...) while asking of each element, ""what does this contribute to the art? Why would a word artist choose to do it this way?"" The text includes over 100 full poems, including the full text of ""The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"" and at the same time presents some basic poetry history to show how each artistic trend came about. Speak Like Rain is laid out as a student text/workbook, but it is also enjoyable for general readers who are out of school and want not only a quick review but added insight. It is suitable for high school and motivated/gifted middle school study, representing a one-semester English elective in a homeschool program. A full answer key makes it suitable for self-teaching. Digital version (pdf file suitable for tablet computer display) is available at ellenjmchenry.com. Kindle ebook is not available because the workbook layout is not suitable for flowing text.

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9780983181033

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Reviews

Ms. Johnston captures the art of poetry and makes it accessible to novice learners. It's an exciting and informative addition to any high school plan, allowing the student to really experience the written word. I loved it and can't wait to use it with my senior next year! ---Felicia Johnson, TheZooICallHome.com My children have always loved memorising poetry but groaned if I mentioned studying it. Speak Like Rain enabled me to draw them into discussions about slang, idioms, and interesting rhymes without realising they were 'studying' poetry, and these discussions naturally led into the exercises. We found it fun and interesting, yet complex and thorough - I highly recommend it. ---Kelly George, FearlessHomeschool.com This book presents the concepts of poetry in an easily graspable way and, most importantly, it makes the subject interesting--even to young teens. We were originally going to use it for only part of our curriculum but it was so well designed and presented the information in such an easily accessible way that we used it for the entire year. --- L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright, writing teacher and author of Prospero's Children trilogy. Aristotle compared poems to living things: organic bodies made up of moving parts that all work together beautifully, in intelligible ways. In Speak Like Rain, Ruth Johnston introduces us to the life of poems, both as lovely, vigorous, moving wholes, and as discernable parts. You will learn here how to do a gross anatomy of a poem--its meter, its rhyme, its figures, its imagery--but also how to see these parts alive together when the work is read out loud. She opens up both why we care about poetry, and how it draws us deeper into the life of the world as we read it. She also introduces the reader to many great wordsmiths of the tradition--Blake, Whitman, Keats, Browning, and many more--letting us into the secrets of their art. In short, Speak Like Rain does what a good introduction should do: it brings us right up to the pulsing heart of lyric poetry, and makes the reader want more! --- Dwight Lindley, Hillsdale College

Author Information

Ruth A. Johnston is an independent scholar, writer, and retired homeschooler. Her books include A Companion to Beowulf (Greenwood Press 2005, Pannebaker Press paperback 2010), All Things Medieval (Greenwood Press 2011), Excavating English (Ellen McHenry's Basement Workshop 2013), Re-Modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance (Pannebaker Press 2015) and Speak Like Rain: An Introduction to Poetry (Pannebaker Press 2019).

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