Freshwater Seas

Freshwater Seas Audiobooks - The Catalog

The Early Poetry of Conrad Aiken

In Earth Triumphant, Conrad Aiken's first major book of poetry, he took on a significant subject: What is the ultimate source of the human spirit? When the young human spirit loves, rages, strives, plays, where does that energy come from? When the old human spirit sees that time has passed and death is coming, where does that spirit find rest? Aiken's answer is unequivocal: in the ancient, ageless, inhuman, nurturing, commanding, accepting Earth. Where many poets might fly off in high abstraction with such a theme, Aiken does not; he keeps his feet on his good earth and connects to everyday reality in ways that have not dated in nearly 100 years. His verse is sophisticated, musically structured, and reads very well. Enjoy!

In Turns and Movies, he does for the world of vaudeville what Edgar Lee Masters does for the town of Spoon River. Focusing each poem on a particular person from the world of small-time, gritty, cut-throat vaudeville, he traces loves and betrayals, friendships and hatreds, lives and deaths.

In Nocturne of Remembered Spring, Aiken continues to explore a theme he dealt with many times: that of a passionate young man who breaks away from his first love and a life of peace and tranquillity, deliberately searching out the tempestous passions of the big city. Throughout the book, Aiken's work is deeply embedded in his vivid perceptions of the natural world, the qualities of light and shadow, the mysteries of night and darkness, the strangely mixed peace and fury of rain and wind and storm. He expresses himself in deeply musical fashion, using repetition, theme, and rhythm much as a composer would do, providiing a hypnotic experience of the power of musical language.

In Charnel Rose, Conrad Aiken takes the plunge into a deeply metaphysical and surrealistic world, capturing the essence of one aspect of quintessential humanity: how we create and pursue a deeply personal, intensely idealistic, physically and emotionally draining search for love, and how some of us turn away from real love when we do find it, preferring instead to re-invent and re-amplify our idealistic vision of passionate perfection. He does this through an amazing combination of highly imaginative imagery conveyed through strikingly simple and beautiful poetry, musically complex and intensely rhythmic without empty literary gesture or hollow convention.

William Morris - The Wood Beyond The World

For many readers and listeners, William Morris invented the genre of fantasy fiction. His novel The Wood Beyond the World transports his hero, Walter the Golden, from the English village of Langton-on-Holm across the seas to a magical kingdom in a forest beyond the known world, ruled by the Mistress, an extraordinarly beautiful, complex, and sinister woman. There he meets the Maid, a woman captured, enslaved, and tortured by the Mistress, who has magical powers of her own. By the strength of their love and the wisdom of the Maid, she and Walter make their escape through the land of the People of the Bear to the kingdom of Starkwall, where a fate even more extraordinary awaits them.

The Curfew Tolls the Knell of Parting Day: Poems by Mr. Gray, including 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'

Thomas Gray is world famous as the author of "Gray's Elegy", more properly known as "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". He did not write very much, but he did write more than just his most famous poem. This collection is a recording of the 1768 Dodsley edition, the primary publication of his poetry that he published during his lifetime. It consists of only 10 poems, written mostly during the 1740s. Although he continued to write after 1768, it does seem as though he regarded this collection as the definitive body of the work he most valued.

These poems are remarkably varied. From the solemn philosophy of the "Elegy", he moves to dramatic portrayals of history and even some rather humorous verse, though always with a moral tone. I invite the reader to enjoy this small collection of Gray, in which one can get a sense of the man behind the verse, the man who wrote the immortal lines of the "Elegy".

The prefaces, proverbs, and poems of Benjamin Franklin, originally printed in editions of Poor Richard's Almanac for 1733 to 1758

Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac has been delighting readers for centuries. However, most readers only encounter the work in editions that, frankly, mangle it. The common practice is to put in all the short, witty sayings that made the books famous and leave out the main body of the work, the longer, and  admittedly less witty, sections that give us a true picture of the mind behind the wit, the serious thinker along with the clever wordsmith.

This gives you, Courteous Listener, a much better appreciation of how Franklin wrote and thought. In particular, you will find that the full body of the Poor Richard almanacs contains a great deal of religious and spiritual thought in which Franklin laid out and propounded his understanding of Christianity as it stood in his day. Last but not least, since a long parade of sayings, poems, etc., would be dull all strung together, this edition includes snippets of music between them, drawn from about four dozen Colonial-era tunes and imitating the sound of Colonial instruments such as flute, fife, lute, English guitar, music box, and harpsichord. May you enjoy it and draw benefit from it, as Ben himself would have wished!

Theory of Psychoanalysis, by Carl Jung

Carl Jung - a thinker that shaped the modern world. Our ideas about ourselves, our minds, and  our lives would be very different if this man had not given us such deep insights into the human psyche and human life in general.

This book is an early work of Jung's, coming just three years after his seminal Psychology of the Unconscious. His break from Freud is  complete, or nearly so. With all that it cost him emotionally, intellectually, and professionally, he is now his own man, and is following his own path.

So, in this book, we see him in transition, his thought a work in progress, his theory a project still under construction. The ideas which we remember him for are taking root; watching them do so is a fascinating experience for students of psychology and its history.

Flame and Shadow, by Sara Teasdale

She lived for love. She lived for beauty. She died by her own hand. She was so intensely passionate in response to love and beauty that sometimes her feelings took the form of physical agony, a passion she somehow trasmuted into poetry of the most limpid clarity and classic form.

She knew the world of her time. She loved New York, but she also loved her family's beautiful home in Charlevoix. She knew the world as a place where human beings loved, loved, created beauty, and died; that is the pattern she shaped in her own life with all the care she devoted to her finest poetry.

"I have loved much and been loved deeply -
Oh, when my spirit's fire burns low,
Leave me the darkness and the stillness.
I shall be tired and glad to go."

Love Songs, by Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale - the winner of one of the earliest Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, winner of the Poetry Society of America prize, and other honors - believed passionately in the power and beauty of love. Yet in her own life, love was not enough; she died by her own hand after a long illness. The man she may have loved more than any other, the poet Vachel Lindsay, had killed himself two years earlier. Teasdale's poetry ranges from utter joy to deep loneliness. She expresses herself with utter simplicity:

Slowly over the earth
The wings of night are falling
My heart like the bird in the tree
Is calling... calling... calling....

And her soul valued beauty and love above all else:

Oh, let me love with all my strength
Careless if I am loved again.

The Early Poetry of Carl Sandburg

First of all, a disclaimer: in these four books of poetry, the books that launched his career, Carl Sandburg spoke in the voice and language of the common man of his time - the 1910's and 1920's. (I use the word "man" advisedly; Sandburg writes about women, but only as a man writes about the opposite gender; he does not write the experience or viewpoint of women.) In the voice and language of that time, it was common, to our ears shockingly common, to use language that was racially and ethnically charged in his day and even more so in ours. It seems more honest to leave these passages unaltered; we did speak this way once. Even our great poets spoke that way, and we do well not to forget the fact or brush it under the rug.

Sandburg is and will remain a great American poet. Like Walt Whitman, he speaks for the common people; unlike Walt Whitman, he had a genuine understanding of the world of exploitation, oppression, and degradation in which the common people of his time lived. For Sandburg, the marvel of the common people is endurance, sheer indestructible strength. Like Edgar Lee Masters, he is capable of brilliant portraiture; unlike Masters, he sees the essence of his world not in individuals, but in universals. That is what leads him to one of his great strengths: an ability to see the world of nature and express it almost as if it were part of his own body and mind.

Stylistically, Sandburg is one of the great poets of free verse. It's impossible to read his poetry without being reminded from time to time that he was also a newspaperman; the sound and feel of this great poet is also, very often, the sound and feel of a great beat reporter. Sometimes his lines and rhythms stretch out so far they almost become prose, but if they do cross the line, what wonderful prose they are!

Would you like to go straight to the Audible.com listings for the Carl Sandburg series?
Just click here!

Kalevala

Here are stories of singers who can sing a ship into existence with nothing to work on but a broken spindle and a few scraps of cloth, who can sing fish out of the ocean and siing treasures out of the earth. Here are stories of warriors who defeat monsters made of fire, who woo and win magic maidens, and - to be honest - sometimes just don't listen to their mothers when they should.

Here is a look back into an ancient culture of Scandinavia, the culture of old Finland, of the lands of Suomi known as Kalevala and Pohya. It is a land of fens and forest, a land beside the sea, a land where people live on fish and honey and what sound like wonderful biscuits, who love good beer and tell tales of how it came to be, who do both their fighting and their loving in song.

This is the poetic style that inspired Longfellow when he wrote The Song of Hiawatha, preserved in metric English from the liquid sounds of Finnish. It was lovingly preserved in Finland by a dedicated scholar named Elias Lönnrot when the tradition was in danger of dying out, and we are proud to bring it to you in recorded form.

The Poetry of Lord Byron

Here is a rarity: an ambitious project to present the entire body of Lord Byron's
non-dramatic poetry in audiobook form. And yes, took us a while! The whole set is
now in release; you'll find details on the Lord Byron page.

The idea is to follow his development as a poet, partly chronologically, partly
thematically. So, for example, the poems he published in his first four books
are grouped together in volumes one, two, and three of this series. Then we'll
move on to his satires, and then to Childe Harold, and so forth through his
amazingly prolific career. It's going to be a fascinating journey!

Would you like to go straight to the Audible.com listings for the Byron release?
Just click here!

Thomas Carlyle, The French

The course of the French
Revolution from the accession
of Louis XVI to the fall of the
Bastille, setting in motion the
turbulent and terrible events
that would play out over the
next few years. .

Thomas Carlyle, The French

The course of the French
Revolution from the aftermath
of the fall of the Bastille to the
insurrection of August 1792,
which effectively brought the
reign of Louis XVI to an end.  .

Thomas Carlyle, The French

The course of the French
Revolution from the aftermath of the
insurrection of August 1792 through
the horrors of the Reign of Terror
and the emergence of the man on
horseback--Napoleon Bonaparte.  .

The Poetry of A. E. Housman
Volume I: A Shropshire Lad

A Shropshire Lad is A. E.
Housman's reflections on love,
death, and the eternal uncertainty
of the human condition, in an
idealized world of rural England,
unpolluted by the taint of the city.

The Poetry of A. E. Housman
Volume II: Last Poems

Housman himself knew that his
output as a poet would not be large.
"I publish these poems, few though
they are, because it is not likely that
I shall ever be impelled to write
much more."

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
as translated into English byEdward
Fitzgerald is one of our best-loved
books of poetry. This recording
draws out the bestversions of each
quatrain to bring out the best of Omar.
 

The Early Poetry of Robert Frost
Volume I
A Boy's Will

Frost weaves together themes of
innocence and experience, love
and joy and pain, in a sequence
of poems that relate to each other
while also standing alone as vivid,
lively expressions of intense feeling
that speak as freshly today as they
did when they were written. .

The Early Poetry of Robert Frost
Volume II
Mountain Interval

Sometimes puckishly humorous,
sometimes elegiac, sometimes
terrifying, these poems show the
young artist using his new-found
voice to explore a world - a village
in New Hampshire - that meant
everything to him.

The Early Poetry of Robert Frost
Volume III
North of Boston

North of Boston is an extraordinary
set of poems that are nearly dramas,
conversations drawn from the heat
of life, love, and death. Frost's work
spans the whole range of human
experience, expressed always in his
characteristic dry, matter-of-fact,
yet wonderfully musical verse.

This presentation of the beloved
tale tells he classic story of
the long night Ebenezer Scrooge
spent with the ghosts of Christmas,
the lessons it taught him and the
change it made in his life. It tells
the story the way Dickens wrote it,
including scenes other versions skip.

Order this on CD from Amazon.com!

There's a long tradition of English
Christmas stories, sometimes
serious, sometimes humorous,
often revolving around ghosts
and apparitions. Here Jerome
K. Jerome tells hilarious stories
from around an English Christmas
fireside.

Order this on CD from Amazon.com!

Here are three of the most
wonderful Christmas stores ever
written, presented for you on one
disk along with two short pieces
that just can't be left out of any
Christmas collection worth its salt.

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Five wonderful stories by
Ambrose Bierce, full of vivid
characters, precise and evocative
language, surprises and suspense.
Written more than a century ago,
these stories still capture the
imagination with vivid, precise
language that bites--and may even
draw blood! Subtle musical
underscoring enhances Bierce's words.

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These poems span the length
and depth of human emotion
from ancient to modern times.
The speak to men and women
who love in the voices of men
and women who not only loved,
but spoke of it with great feeling
and passion.

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Rupert Brooke possessed one
of the most amazing poetic minds
of the 20th century. Born into a
world swiftly sliding into war, torn
between highly idealized, romanticized
relationships with men and conflicted,
often bitter love for women, he
expressed his complex emotions and
vivid perceptions in verse of startling
force, striking sensory intensity, and
sometimes sly and biting humor.

Here are three stories that will make
you chuckle and shiver at the same
time. Spirits can be funny when
they turn out to have issues and
problems of their own, and the
authors of these stories, John
Kendrick Bangs and H. G. Wells,
have a fine time putting smiles on
our faces - and wiping them off again!

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Three great tales of meetings with
ghosts, and perhaps more than ghosts!
M. R. James The Haunted Doll's
House, Richard Middleton's  On
the Brighton Road, and Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman's The Vacant Lot
all go to show that meeting a ghost
can be a very dangerous thing!

Order this on CD from Amazon.com!

Here are two terrifying and
sobering stories of ghosts who will
stop at nothing! Henry James, the
American master of psychological
insight and storytelling, and M. R.
James, who knows the dangers
that can lurk in old books and old
obsessions, team up to tell about
ghosts you don't wantto meet
down a dark hallway!

Order this on CD from Amazon.com!

Pity Sir Simon de Canterville,
the poor Ghost of Canterville
Chase! He killed his wife and
was then starved to death by her
brothers, but ever since then he's
been happily haunting the family's
mansion, always inventing fresh
characters and costumes and
blood-curdling shrieks. Now comes
the challenge--an American family!

Three stories by Rudyard Kipling,
all about the marvelous nature of
elephants. "The Elephant's Child",
"Moti Guj, Mutineer," and
"Toomai of the Elephants," all
marvelous stories, told with
wit and wonder by Rudyard
Kipling, for young and old
of all ages.

In these two tales Rudyard Kipling
explores good and evil, materialism
and spirituality. In "The King's Ankus",
the wolf-boy Mowgli confronts a
treasure forwhich humankind will kill.
In "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat",
a man casts all aside for the humble
life of a wandering beggar-priest--until
circumstances bring him once more
to take command and save life.

Want to just cut to the chase? Here's the link to all three of our Stephen Crane poetry titles on Audible.com.

Poetry of Stephen Crane vol I
The Black Riders

In 1894, Stephen Crane showed
Hamlin Garland a set of poems.
Garland showed them to John D.
Barry, who arranged for a public
reading. Crane could not summon
up the courage to read the poems, but
Copeland and Day took on the work.
Over a hundred years later, his poems
are incredibly fresh. Torn by a sense
of sin, outraged a God he rejected, his
poems brim with bitteness, yet humor
as well. He demands his listener's full
attention, and rewards it.

Poetry of Stephen Crane vol II
War is Kind

Stephen Crane's second book
of poetry followed up the success
of his first book, Black Riders. His
search for love, his lonely, bitter
struggle to make his peace with God,
the war in his heart between cynicism
and an unshakeable longing for truth
and beauty - these all continue in his
second book. Sadly, this second book
was also his last, for he died tragically
young. The Freshwater Seas
presentation of his work also includes
a third set of uncollected and
posthumously published poetry.

These thirty poems form, in
essence, a third volume of his
powerful work. All display the
classic Crane voice: cynical, often
despairing, utterly at war with God,
yet able to see past mere cynicism
and despair to a deep, true perception
of the world as he knew it..