Rhyme and Reason

If you're a reader who's been procrastinating about poetry, 'tis the season to give the genre a try. April is National Poetry Month—the perfect time to check out the work of new poets or to revisit those beloved verse writers you knew so well in school. Without a doubt, poetry is the perfect literary form for our fast-paced world, offering concentrated doses of wisdom, humor and insight in the space of a few lines.

In honor of National Poetry Month, BookPage is highlighting three standout volumes of verse. Make some room on your shelves for one—or all—of the books below.

Celebrating the best new poetry books for spring

REVIEWS BY JULIE HALE

The best from Britain

James Fenton has long been one of England's most celebrated poets. His work—prickly, spiny, short on sentiment—features a bleak realism that's balanced by a rapscallion sort of humor. His Selected Poems spans 30 years, providing a wonderful overview of his distinguished career.

Fenton, who is 58, got his start as a reporter in Southeast Asia—an experience that informed his earliest poetry. "Children in Exile" focuses on a Cambodian family suffering from the displacement of war: "I hear a child moan in the next room and I see / The nightmare spread like rain across his face / And his limbs twitch in some vestigial combat / In some remembered place." A haunting image like this one, couched in a quatrain, described in rhyme, is made all the more forceful by its formal setting. This use of traditional structures often heightens the irony of Fenton's verse. "God: A Poem" is a classic example: "I didn't exist at Creation / I didn't exist at the Flood / And I won't be around for Salvation / To sort out the sheep from the cud—" Playful yet perverse, the lines are a crystalline representation of Fenton's singular aesthetic.


A beloved poet returns

With A Worldly Country, revered writer John Ashbery offers his 26th book of verse. The Rochester, New York, native and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet turns 80 this year, and the pieces in this new volume find him in a phase of life in which looking back seems more disturbing than trying to puzzle out what's to come. In "Image Problem," he comes to grips with past perspectives: "The solution may therefore be / to narrow the zone of reaction to a pinprick / and ignore what went on before, even when we called it life."

Marked by flights of verbal fancy, Ashbery's poems display an inquisitive yet reflective mindset. His delicately constructed lines contrast with the weight of his themes: age, mortality, the movement of the seasons, an awareness of his own precarious position in the universe. "Reflected in the window / of a pharmacy," he writes in "Litanies," "you know the distance you've come." The precisely rhymed title piece reflects a hard-won wisdom on the part of the poet: "So often it happens that the time we turn around in / soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in. / And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea / we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free."


A brilliant debut

Newcomer Matt Donovan offers a remarkable collection of poems in Vellum, his first book and the winner of the 2006 Katherine Bakeless Prize for Poetry. Throughout the volume, Donovan writes about the master artists of the past, their working methods and materials—from plaster to ink to paint—comparing their crafts to his own. His poems are painterly and often catalogue images, as in "A Partial Invocation of Our Days": "And yet, let's begin with macadam, fruit bowls, a Florentine mosaic / Louie Louie's three slurred chords . . . Since otherwise our days brim with dismantling, breakage, endless / riffs on the division into parts, I'll invoke here only assemblage."

Artists of all stripes—Charlie Chaplin, Harry Houdini, Botticelli, Pablo Neruda—make appearances in these poems, demonstrating the multiplicity of the creative act. Donovan's broad range of reference and the visual nature of his verses gives this book a wonderful sense of scope and historical perspective. Donovan, it seems, is an artist in love with creation, a writer in love with life, and these rich, vivid poems prove it.


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