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I Live by the Invisible is Ray Bradbury's 2002 new and selected poetry collection, drawing roughly two hundred poems from his lifelong commitment to verse alongside the fiction. Bradbury wrote poems for nearly seven decades, and most readers of his fiction never noticed. The collection is the right correction.
The poetry is recognizably Bradbury: sensory, nostalgic, prone to mid-twentieth-century American myth-making. He is best when writing about specific objects (a brass telescope, a Halloween mask, a circus that left town) and weakest when reaching for the cosmic. The collection includes verse from the early Dandelion Wine years through 9/11 elegies. The pieces on Mars are unsurprisingly some of the strongest.
Recommended for Bradbury readers curious about the parallel verse career, for collectors, and for readers looking for books like I Live by the Invisible in the late-twentieth-century American mainstream poetry tradition (more Robert Frost than Lowell, more Sandburg than Stevens). Three stars, with affection.
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