Begin Again: Collected Poems by Grace PaleyFarrar Straus Giroux, 2000

I already knew I loved Grace Paley’s short stories, and it turns out that I love her poems, too. I love her city-poems, about streets I recognize, like “An Arboreal Mystery” (which begins with the lines “On Jane Street in October/I saw three gingko trees”) and “20th Street Spring” (about the seminary way out on the western edges of Chelsea). Her country-poems, about Vermont hills and leaves and sky and the perils and pleasures of home-ownership, are wonderful, too: simple and beautiful and funny, not precious, not trite. Paley writes about being a woman, about being in love, about being an American liberal activist, about being the child of immigrant parents, about growing old (“at last a woman/in the old style sitting/stout thighs apart under/a big skirt”), and through it all, even in the poems about political outrages, about people dying in America and abroad, there’s a sense of life, or more: a love of life.