Poems for a Month or One Day

April is National Poetry Month, and today is Poem in Your Pocket Day.  April also is the birth month (and death month) of William Shakespeare, so poetry is definitely in the air and on our minds at Bernardsville Library.  Two of our book displays this month have showcased poets and poetry, one entitled “Life in Poetry” and the other featuring a variety of poetry collections in honor of National Poetry Month.  In addition, we have hosted a library program, “Coffee, Tea and Poetry,” where the audience was invited to read a variety of pre-selected poems.  Carl Sandburg wrote that  ”Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.” Poem in Your Pocket Day urges us to open our own packsacks and find expression through poetry.  To facilitate this, our library facebook page today welcomes the public to share a poem in honor of Poem in Your Pocket Day.

What Memory Serves

Bernardsville Library's book group, Memoirs and Coffee, will discuss Half a Life by Darin Strauss at its next meeting on Tuesday, April 24th, at 10:30 a.m.  Memoirs and Coffee, led by Pat Kennedy-Grant, welcomes newcomers, who may obtain copies of the book at the circulation desk.  The title of Half a Life refers in part to the author's realization that he had lived half a lifetime longer than the teenage bicyclist he accidentally killed with his car when he was also a teen. As The New York Times 2010 review notes, "At the center of this elegant, painful, stunningly honest memoir thrums a question fundamental to what it means to be human: What do we do with what we’ve been given?"  For Strauss, those pain-filled memories and present-day consequences must be thoroughly examined in the manner in which he can best deliver, as a writer.

Cleopatra

Cleopatra: a Life, by Stacy Schiff, will be the subject of Saturday Samplers next book discussion to be held this Saturday, April 14th, at 3:30 p.m.  Saturday Samplers is a Bernardsville Library book group which meets once a month in the library on a Saturday afternoon.  For more information about the book group, link to the Saturday Samplers blog.

Stacy Schiff is an award-winning biographer who met with literary success early in her career.  Born in 1961, Ms. Schiff attended Williams College.  She subsequently worked for Simon & Schuster as a writer and editor until 1990, at which point she settled into steady work as an acclaimed biographer. Her first publication in 1994, the biography of aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, was selected as a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and her biography of Vera Nabokov won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000.  A well-received biography of Benjamin Franklin preceded her latest publication, Cleopatra: a Life.  Learn more about Stacy Schiff or Cleopatra: a Life on the author's Web site.

Bernardsville Library Mobile App

Connect with us on the go! 

Check your account, search the catalog, access library information, download e-books and much more, all from our new Mobile app. Simply go to our Web site and download the app right onto your Android, iPhone or iPad.

Starting April 9th, the first 500 Bernardsville Library cardholders to download the library’s mobile app and show it to us on their mobile devices will get a free Driinn Mobile Phone Holder at the library (one per person).  Funding is provided by LibraryLinkNJ and the Friends of the Bernardsville Public Library.