Language without limits: celebrating the poetic impulse

REVIEWS BY JULIE HALE

Pop songs and ad slogans, church hymns and children's rhymes: poetry today has all kinds of applications. It multitasks, right beneath our noses. Even as people insist that they never read it, poetry has, all unobserved, become ubiquitous. Whether we want to admit it or not, those formal works of verse we encounter in magazines and books continue to raise age-old expectations in our consciousness. We go to poetry hoping for a moment of transcendence, connection that's out of the ordinary, a key, an instant answer.

In honor of National Poetry Month, BookPage is spotlighting collections by some of the top contemporary poets. The books featured here should satisfy the poetic impulse in every reader.

Digging deep

Best known for a pair of provocative memoirs, The Liar's Club and Cherry, Mary Karr is also an acclaimed poet. A new collection called Sinners Welcome finds her coming to terms with her spiritual self, remembering lost friends and battling the empty-nest blues as her son leaves home for college. Karr is a master craftswoman, and her poems call attention to themselves through their very apparent artistry. She digs in deep to create tension—a verbal reversal that's unexpected, a phrase that astonishes, an image that startles.

In "Revelations in the Key of K," Karr describes how the alphabet has literally shaped her life: "I came awake in kindergarten,/under the letter K chalked neat. . . And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid—/names of my beloveds, sacred vows I'd break." A series of pieces re-envisioning famous religious tableaux (the Crucifixion, the Nativity, the Garden of Gethsemane) contains some of the collection's most precise and sculpted poetry. Indeed, Karr's own spiritual quest is the foundation of the book, which concludes with a wonderful essay called "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer."


An isolated soul

The work of Franz Wright displays a different kind of craftsmanship. In God's Silence the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer offers looser, more spacious poems with lines less closely knit, the absorption of them as natural as respiration for the reader. Marked by melancholy and a seemingly hard-won wisdom, the collection as a whole reflects the plight of an isolated soul at odds with the unseen.

In "On the Bus," a poem at once nightmarish and lovely, a trip by public transportation brings to the poet's mind a group execution, inspires "diverting speculations/on the comparative benefits/of waiting in front of a ditch to be shot." Despite the sharing of a common, horrible fate, Wright imagines a lack of solidarity among the people involved. This tension between the opposing poles of isolation and communion is a recurring theme. For the poet, there is no co-existence, only existence: "Nobody has called for some time./(I was always the death of the party.)" he writes in "Progress."

Wright produces poems of unusual intimacy, and his humility, as evidenced in an urgent prose poem called "From the Past," stays with the reader in the end: "Who did I imagine I was, that things as they are, reality as God gave it, was not enough for me?


Origins of a genius

Literature lovers will be in raptures over Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), one of American's most beloved authors. The new volume, assembled by Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker, collects for the first time fascinating archival material, giving readers access to lesser-known poems, poems in progress, and brief prose works.

Ever-attentive to both nature and culture, Bishop was truly a cosmopolitan poet, and the selections reflect this, categorized as they are by locale: Brazil, Nova Scotia, New York. Overall, the works are formal and orderly, adhering to strict schemes of rhyme and meter, but they're leavened by Bishop's wit and her observant eye, which never fails to provide fresh perspectives. "Sometimes you embolden, sometimes bore," she writes of the sea in "Apartment in Leme." "You smell of codfish and old rain. Homesick, the salt/weeps in the salt-cellars."

The collection provides a wonderful glimpse into the origins of Bishop's genius, and her personal evolution—the movement from girlhood to womanhood, from the romantic to the ironic—can be traced here. Bishop won every prize imaginable during her lifetime, from the Pulitzer Prize to the National Book Award, and with this new volume, it's easy to see why.


A poet's take on poetry

Edward Hirsch began contributing his "Poet's Choice" column to The Washington Post Book World not long after 9/11, and the weekly feature immediately struck a chord with readers. His new book, Poet's Choice, is a collection of those columns that covers the work of more than 130 poets from different eras and countries.

Writing with a gentle touch about a formidable genre, Hirsch invites readers to further explore the work of Vietnam War poets, Asian-American women poets, contemporary Mexican poets and Scottish poets. He also dissects individual works, taking them apart so readers can see how they function. Reviewing new poetry collections from modern authors like Stuart Dischell, Deborah Digges and Bill Knott, he provides ample historical context for their work.

A wonderfully accessible book, Poet's Choice is divided into two parts: the first focuses on international writers, while the second looks at American authors. There's plenty of new material in the volume, as Hirsch has revisited and expanded many of his original columns. An acclaimed poet in his own right, Hirsch is the author of six verse collections, as well as the best-selling book How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. With Poet's Choice, he offers a delightful tutorial in both classic and contemporary verse.


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