The Wellspring

Author

Rita Dove

Poet Rita Dove was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 1993 at the age of 40. Much of her work is about the African-American experience, although many of her poems also show her love of music, history, and creativity. A group of poems about a working class family going through difficult times begins...

Author	Jane Kenyon
ISBN	1555972667

Otherwise collects a lifetime's work by one of contemporary poetry's most cherished talents. Opening with twenty new poems and including generous selections from Jane Kenyon's four previous books—From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance—this collection...

Author	Carolyn Forché
ISBN	0060909269

“Here is poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called ‘political’ at the same time. This is a major new voice.” — Margaret Atwood

The Country Between Us opens with a series of poems about El Salvador, where Carolyn Forché...

Author	Claudia Emerson
ISBN	0807130842

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for...

Author	Marie Howe
ISBN	0892551275

Selected by Margaret Atwood as a winner in the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series, this unique collection was the first sounding of a deeply authentic voice. Ms. Howe's early writings concern relationship, attachment, and loss, in a highly original search for personal transcendence....

Author	Brenda Shaughnessy
ISBN	0374526982

The Next Illogical Step In Love Poetry

"The next illogical step
in love poetry
The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world
always do sound like diseases.
It is because they are engorged.
G., I am a fool.
What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us.
Halfway...

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	Robert Hass
ISBN	0300076339

The Winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, presents sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the...

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	Natasha Trethewey
ISBN	1555973094

Winner of the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award

In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken...

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	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	Tony Hoagland
ISBN	1555972683

Winner of the 1997 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets

In his second collection of poems, Hoagland's generous effervescence and a jujitsu cleverness sparkle through line after line confronting negotiation and compromise, gender and culture, sex and rock music, sons and...

Author	Adrienne Rich
ISBN	0393038688

A new book of poems by one of America's most distinguished poets.

"When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?" asks Adrienne Rich in Dark Fields of the Republic, her major new work. Her explorations go to the heart of democracy and love, and the historical and present endangerment...

Author	Matthea Harvey
ISBN	1555973965

Harvey, whose debut collection was praised by the New Yorker
as "intensely visual, mournfully comic and syntactically
inventive," offers her second stunning collection

Units are the engines
I understand best.

One betrayal, two.
Merrily, merrily, merrily.
-from...

Author	Denise Duhamel
ISBN	0914061615

I'd buy this book just for the cover, but the poems are even twice as wonderful. Denise Duhamel has apparently obsessed for months about the Barbie doll phenomenon: all the poems have to do with the "what if " of Barbie attempting to fit into the real world. For example, what if Barbie were codependent?...

Author	Kim Addonizio
ISBN	0393068528

A lyrically intense fifth collection from “one of the nation’s most provocative and edgy poets” (San Diego Union-Tribune).

With both passion and precision, Lucifer at the Starlite explores life’s dual nature: good and evil, light and dark, suffering and moments of unexpected...

Author

Anne Sexton

These poems were remarkably good from one of my favourite poets, it's difficult to pick a favourite, "THE INTERROGATION OF THE MAN OF MANY HEARTS", "FOR MY LOVER, RETURNING TO HIS WIFE", "THE BREAK", "THE BALLAD OF THE LONELY MASTURBATOR", and "Us" (featured below), were probably my top five.

"I...