Whether writing about the existential complications of playground basketball (the Willie poems), the unbearable beauties of Thelonious Monk (Braiding My Sister's Hair) or why Stevie Wonder is the bomb (Time With Stevie Wonder In It), Christopher Gilbert captures both the soul and the aching of African-American experience. Deserves a place beside Robert Hayden, Yusef Komunyakaa, June Jordan and Rita Dove.

The Franconia, New Hampshire, farm of the American poet Robert Frost was turned into a museum and center for poetry and the arts in 1976. From that time, "The Frost Place" has been annual event wherein an emerging poet has been invited to spend the summer living in the house where Frost once lived and wrote some of his greatest poetry. The Breath Of Parted Lips: Voices From The Robert Frost Place, Volume One is a remarkable anthology of twenty-four poets, each of whom won that honor of a summer's residency and document the success of the original concept as a means of generating outstanding poetry while nurturing the poet's muse in the rooms and views that were once the inspiration of the great Robert Frost. Poem At 40: Windwashed--as if standing next to the highway,/a truck long as the century sweeping by,/all things at last bent in the same direction./An opening, as if all/the clothes my ancestors ever wore/dry on lines in my body:/wind-whipped, parallel with the ground,/some sleeves sharing a single clothespin/so that they seem to clasp hands,/seem to hold on.//And now that I can see/up the old women's dresses,/there's nothing but a filtered light./And now that their men's smoky breath/has traversed the earth,/it has nothing to do with them./And now that awkward, fat tears of rain/slap the window screen,/now that I'm naked too,/cupping my genitals, tracing with a pencil/the blue vein between my collar bone and breast,/I'll go to sleep when I'm told.

I have enjoyed Gilbert & Sullivan's plays since I was a little girl. I watched performances of their comic operas that my family taped off of public television, but I never knew much about the men who wrote these wonderfully entertaining operas. Just recently I had an opportunity to give a presentation on Gilbert and Sullivan's operas for a college course. This book was the first one I picked up and it turned out to be the only one I needed. This well-written book gives an entertaining account of the lives of these great men. The book also paints a vivid picture of what life and, more importantly, the theater were like when Gilbert & Sullivan began their collaboration. I highly recommend this book to anyone who would like to learn more about Gilbert & Sullivan, Victorian life, or English theater.

Although the book has good photos, many of the items are not represented correctly. Many items are listed in more than 1 place with different prices or descriptions. A bit more editing and homework would have been worthwhile for this book.
Prices are in many instances good, in others not realistic- either too high or too low. It seems that personal taste and preferences play a big role with the authors.
OK to look at the pictures, don't bother with the text.

Photographs and descriptions done very well. Prices not based in reality. I am an appraiser of antique and period jewelry and wish I could pay these prices.

The Price Guide to Antique Jewelry is a very well done book for the beginner, the expert and everyone in between.

The information is easy to understand, while the pricing information gives the reader a good feel for the real price levels you should expect to pay for antique jewelry, NOT "steals" at garage or estate sales.

Determining values of pieces can be very difficult for people not "in the business". This book does a great job at giving the reader solid, dependable information without listing prices that are "questionable" to either the buyer OR the seller!

As a collector, the book has helped me to feel much more confident when deciding what to purchase and how much I should be willing to pay. It's nice to see something current and thorough finally written about jewelry pricing.

Thanks for letting me add my "two cents".

A collector of over 100 pieces of antique jewelry.