The Poetry of Longfellow (Unabridged‪)‬

This is a short collection of the standard Longfellow poems including Hiawatha, Wreck of the Hesperus and Paul Revere. Hal Holbrook is perfect for this type of poetry with his manly, stern voice that is easy to understand. The Chapters downloaded on my computer as "Chapter 1," etc, so I don't have a list of the poem titles, which is irritating. Also, Hiawatha has a very odd PA-system sound to it with hissing s's, which was just unbearable to my ear and I skipped the chapter! Otherwise this is a fine collection of nicely read poems.

I have thoroughly enjoyed Hal Holbrook's work and expected to enjoy this album. However, the recording quality is less than excellent and there is no way to skip from poem to poem. My sons are memorizing, "The Village Blacksmith" which is why we sought out this reading in the first place. To our horror a mistake was made in the recording and consequently half of a stanza was mistakenly left out! My five year old said, "I guess he didn't have it memorized right."