Many-Storied House: Poems (Kentucky Voices)

This collection of poems is very cathartic. I think everyone can find something they can relate to and have a sense of nostalgia.

Beautiful collection of poetry. Compacted as if a novel in song. I love how each poem tells its own story of a home and what makes up everyday life in a house. Each poem builds on a previous one and explains more. The final poem makes me think of dreams I often have of my father, who has been dead now for six years. I dream he is alive again and it seems so natural to speak with him. Good poetry evokes what is real to all of us and elevates the mundane as it also brings the sublime down to our own level where we can sense it around us.

Maybe its the theme of losing parents, but this book of poetry was a punch in the gut. I read it to find mentor texts to teach students, but I found more than that.

Loved this work - took me right back to my Kentucky childhood! I need to read it again, which may or may not clear up some mysterious quirks within its covers. Highly recommended!

These poems opened a door to my own House of the Past -- this is a collection to return to again and again.

Wonderful I always enjoy Ms Lyons poetry.

Tepid poetry with a large yawn factor!

This brilliant collection of poems— so relevant to our very mobile population and to baby boomers who are grappling with family homes—is the 68-year story of Ms. Lyon’s growing-up house. I love it. It is exquisitely written. The author goes through the house (by way of the bathroom window as a kid, as she is hoisted up when her parents have locked the keys inside) room by room, person by person, in careful detail, showing the making and unmaking of the house which she has to do at her mother’s death. This is a strong, cinematic work of the life within that house—the joys and sorrows; rites of passage and revelations—within the context of important national and world events. Ms. Lyon masterfully guides the reader around this house of universal memories with incredible metaphor: In “Provenance,” "Fourth/ house on the right, two-story,/ reddish brown and white./ You can’t miss it.” The chair her grandmother didn’t die in. “No/ wings on her back that day.” Cutting her doll’s hair into a spike punk style of the future. “That’s the kind/ of doll mother I was.” She tenderly renders the shelter we call home as, “A house is a child you carry/ on the outside.” I will read this book many times over.

Such a beautiful collection of poems. I use these poems with grade 9 English students and they love them.