Questions About Angels

Author	B.H. Fairchild
ISBN	1882295161

I might give this book five stars just on the basis of the poems "Beauty" and "Body and Soul." The first is a stunning hymn to the American resistance to beauty (that soft and useless presence in the world). The second is one of the greatest poems to use a sport (baseball) as its platform--though of course...

Author	Edward Hirsch
ISBN	0156032678

Edward Hirsch began writing a column called "Poet’s Choice" in the Washington Post Book World in 2002. This book brings together those enormously popular columns, some of which have been revised and expanded, to present a minicourse in world poetry. Poet’s Choice includes the work of more than...

Author	Denise Levertov
ISBN	0811210278

In the first collection of Levertov's poems that I read, I was struck by her anger and sadness over the Vietnam war, as well as the attention to the natural world I had expected. In "Breathing the Water," her talent for observation of the world around her is again on display, with that focus turned to not...

Author	Ted Kooser
ISBN	0822958775

Named U.S. Poet Laureate for 2004-2006, Ted Kooser is one of America's masters of the short metaphorical poem. Dana Gioia has remarked that Kooser has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation.

In Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, Kooser has selected poems from two of his earlier...

Author	Jane Hirshfield
ISBN	0060779195

My first sustained meeting with Jane Hirschfield, and I've a feeling we'll sit for coffee again, given her knack for subtle metaphor and fascination with, oh, dogs and mortality and personification. I felt it was stronger BEFORE than After, but maybe it was me. The beginning of the book I read at 4 a.m.,...

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0679740023

The Father is a sequence of poems, a daughter's vision of a father's illness and death. It chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion...

Author	Kay Ryan
ISBN	0802137172

Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan's poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan's fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and...

Author	Naomi Shihab Nye
ISBN	1880238152

Poet, teacher, essayist, anthologist, songwriter and singer, Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the country's most acclaimed writers. Her voice is generous; her vision true; her subjects ordinary people, and ordinary situations which, when rendered through her language, become remarkable. In this, her...

Author	Stephen Dunn
ISBN	0393327434

"Beauty isn't nice. Beauty isn't fair;" So, in part, states an epigraph for this stunning new collection, his thirteenth, by the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry (2000). First traversing betrayal and loss, Stephen Dunn then moves to speak of new love, with its attendant pleasures and questioning....

Author	Mary Oliver
ISBN	0807068195

As Diane Wakoski has noted, the power of Mary Oliver's Frost-influenced pastoral writing is in her ability to cast a spell, to create "the illusion that the natural world is graspable." Oliver's fierce independence, beautiful imagery, and love and knowledge of the natural world are all driven by a...

Author	Amy Gerstler
ISBN	1439181454

AMY GERSTLER’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATIVE POETRY that conveys meaning, feeling, wit, and humor informs the cross section of poems in the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. The works collected here represent the wealth, the breadth, and the tremendous energy of poetry in the United States...

Author	Garrison Keillor
ISBN	0143037676

Chosen by Garison Keillor for his readings on public radio's The Writer's Almanac, the 185 poems in this follow-up to his acclaimed anthology Good Poems are perfect for our troubled times. Here, readers will find solace in works that are bracing and courageous, organized into such resonant headings...

Author	Donald Hall
ISBN	0395957656

You might expect the fact of dying--the dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet--to make for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors...

Author	Charles Simic
ISBN	0156035642

‘A dog trying to write a poem on why he barks,
That’s me, dear reader!’

‘Comedy and tragedy are never far from one another,’ Charles Simic, former US Poet Laureate (2007-2008), says in a recent interview with Granta magazine, wonderfully highlighting the thin balance of bottom-of-a-bottle...

Author	Mark Doty
ISBN	0060952563

Mark Doty's last two award-winning collections of poetry, as well as his acclaimed memoir Heaven's Coast, used the devastation of AIDS as a lens through which to consider questions of loss, love and identity. The poems in his new collection, Sweet Machine, see the world from a new, hard-won perspective:...

Author	Galway Kinnell
ISBN	0679732810

Kinnell studied at Princeton University, graduating in 1948. He later obtained a Master's degree from the University of Rochester.

As a young man, Kinnell served in the US Navy and traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. His first volume of poetry, What a Kingdom It Was, was published...

Author

Thomas Lux

One of the New York Public Library's 25 "Books to Remember" in 1997

Lux comments on the absurd, the pathetic, and the commonplace in our culture, writing with compassion as well as satire. He is "singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human...