Category: Poetry

The poems I like best in this book are the ones that deal with places, maybe because these poems are full of satisfying specificity: Vermont and its lake and gulls, Saratoga in summer rain, L.A. with its oleander and “Hockney blue” pools and, perhaps my favorite poems of all, the ones about Paris in the…

I think Adrienne Rich was the first poet I really enjoyed reading: I read “Diving into the Wreck” in a high school English class, then bought The Fact of a Doorframe later in high school and read and re-read my way through that book in late high school and early college. I haven’t read so…

Before reading this book I’m not sure I could have told you the name of the founder of the Shakers. Now I can: it was Mother Ann Lee, and this book of poems tells the story of her life. The three sections of the book are arranged chronologically: the first, the Word of Life, tells…

I picked this book out from the “new books” shelf at the library based on its title (I do like Proust!) and its cover, which is letterpress-printed and lovely, an old street map with great type. I flipped the book open and whatever poem I saw (I don’t remember which one it was) was good…

The back cover gives a better summary than I could: “‘Eunoia,’ which means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter.” This is, as you might guess, both excellent and a little tedious, though…

This book, the first I’ve read of Keith Waldrop’s work, felt difficult, both allusive and elusive, and more abstract than the poetry I tend to prefer. It won the National Book Award for Poetry last year, but somehow I hadn’t heard of it until it caught my eye at the library, and I picked it…

The Mansion of Happiness is a board game from 1843. I remember having a reproduction of it when I was a kid: I must have had that whole three-game set, but The Mansion of Happiness is the only one I have any memory of, the decorations in the corners of the board, the path from…

I like poems that are buildings of images; I like poems that are stories. Kristin Naca writes both those kinds of poems, and also writes lyrical poems, romantic poems, poems that play with language(s) and words. Sometimes the poems in this collection were too lyrical for me, or too language-focused, but others are just lovely,…

The poems in this collection that I like best are the ones that intertwine the speaker’s voice with another voice, with quotes and descriptions from other writers: I like the layers of those poems, the interplay of voices and places and times, how now slips into then or vice versa. Like “Posthumous Man,” (ignore the…