The Insistence of Beauty

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	Czesław Miłosz
ISBN	0060188677

Selected Poems: 1931-2004 celebrates Czeslaw Milosz's lifetime of poetry. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of expression and probing inquiry. Life opened for Czeslaw Milosz at a crossroads of civilizations in northeastern Europe. This was less a melting...

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	Larry Levis
ISBN	0822935112

Since the appearance of his first book in 1972, Larry Levis has been one of the most original and most highly praised of contemporary American poets. In Winter Stars, a book of love poems and elegies, Levis engages in a process of relentless self-interrogation about his life, about losses and acceptances. ...

Author	Seamus Heaney
ISBN	0571178227

The poems in Seamus Heaney's collection The Spirit Level keep discovering the possibilities of 'a new beginning' in all kinds of subjects and circumstances. What is at stake, in poem after poem, is the chance of buoyancy and balance, physical, spiritual and political. Private memories, classical...

Author	Dorianne Laux
ISBN	1880238071

Hadn't read this in a dozen or more years (thanks again Boone), and it's hot-damn fantastic. Here's an excerpt from one of my favorites, "After Twelve Days of Rain," which you can hear her read here:

Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went...

Author	Philip Levine
ISBN	0679740589

Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
 
“This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous...

Author	Billy Collins
ISBN	0822942119

Billy Collins can pack the house. Funny and laid-back, his clear, often brief poems are easy to understand and enjoy -- which is why his readings are sometimes standing-room-only affairs. Collins may be a college professor and NEA-grant recipient, but he's not above using a disinfectant ad as an epigraph....

Author	Carl Phillips
ISBN	0374267162

Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most distinctive--and one of poetry's most essential--contemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course...

Author	Sarah Manguso
ISBN	1882295331

Holy fuck.

This is one of those books of poetry I keep next to my elbow while writing prose, so I can read it and be inspired when my own prose starts not to sound beautiful enough.

It's also one of those books of poetry that makes you desperate to be best friends with the author, and SURE that...

Author	Tony Hoagland
ISBN	0299135845

Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation:  sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion.  With what Robert Pinsky has called “the saving vulgarity of American poetry,”  Hoagland’s small biographies of destruction...

Author	Mary Oliver
ISBN	0807068926

Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could. So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit,...

Author	Aimee Nezhukumatathil
ISBN	0971031088

Poetry. As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates...

Author	Li-Young Lee
ISBN	0918526531

In this outstanding first book of poems, Lee is unafraid to show emotion, especially when writing about his father or his wife. "But there is wisdom/ in the hour in which a boy/ sits in his room listening," says the first poem, and Lee's silent willingness to step outside himself imbues Rose with a rare...

Author	Cate Marvin
ISBN	1932511512

update: I'm thinking this could have been edited into a slimmer and more powerful collection, because I feel like some of the poems were powerful and unique whereas others were just mediocre and not so unique.

Overall, 3 3/4 stars.

***

Macabre in a creepily sing songy manner....

Author	Shaindel Beers
ISBN	1844715051

"A Brief History of Time," Beers' first collection of poetry, is at once an exploration of what it is to grow up in rural America and a treatise for social justice. These poems, many of them award-winning, span a wide range of styles-from plainsong free verse to sestinas to nearly epic works. The characters/speakers...

Author	Charles Simic
ISBN	0156135469

I wrote to Charles Simic this past winter. Like a total stalker, I followed a trail of breadcrumbs that lead me to his university email address. Having had a few drinks by this time, I shrugged off anxiety and wrote to him. I told of a time when a volume of his poetry played a critical role in a very sentimental...

Author	Frank Bidart
ISBN	0374286035

This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics--his first book not dominated by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and song. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively violent, these new poems have, by conceding time's finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike anything...