Smith’s poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster.”—Marvin Bell“I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem.”—Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judgeFrom Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation’s premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade—a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned cele-bration of poetry’s liberating power.

    In his sixth book of poems, James Galvin writes from a deep, philosophical engagement with the landscape and faces a "vertigo of solitude" with his marriage dissolved, his only daughter grown and gone, and the log house he built by hand abandoned. "What did I love that made me believe it would last?" he asks.Something has to be true enough to beTaken for granted.In the hospital I sawAn old manCaressing the face of an old woman.This same man, young, caressed her faceIn just that way.That’s the stillnessAt the center of change—A sadness worth dying for, I swear—There is no other.—from "Dying into What I’ve Done""James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry."—The Nation"In James Galvin we have a superior poet."—American Book Review"Galvin’s poems have the virtues of precise observation and original language, yes, but what he also brings to the table is a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make the slightest of his poems an architectural pleasure."—Harvard ReviewJames Galvin has published five collections of poetry, most recently Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975–1997, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, The Meadow and a novel, Fencing the Sky. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he works as a rancher part of each year, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

    In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South--one poem, Kith, exploring that strange bedfellow of kin--the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead.Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them--of us--poetry can save.

    Responding to the post-industrial landscape of rural life, Jenny George braids together regional plains poetry and the darkly fantastic imagery of medieval painting. Alluding to Goya’s grotesque bestiary, The Dream of Reason is similarly preoccupied with creatures of all kinds: tiny husks of insects, bats crawling across porches like goblins, purring moths, and pigs, in many forms. George names these creatures and documents the traumas of farm life, the role of the handlers involved, and the empathy and horror that comes with it. The collection lingers, transfixed by its strange imaginings, searching for sense in the dark.

    Here refugees listen to relaxation tapes that create an Arcadia out of tires and bleach. Here the alphabet spells out disaster and devours children. Here plate tectonics birth a misery rift, spinning loved ones away from each other across an uncaring sea. And here the cosmos--and Cosmos, as Carl Sagan's hopeful words are fissured by erasure--yawns wide.Wilder is grimly visceral but also darkly sly; it paints its world in shades of neon and rust, and its apocalypse in language that runs both sublime and matter-of-fact. "Some of us didn't have lungs left," writes Wahmanholm. "So when we lay beneath the loudspeaker sky--when we were told to pay attention to our breath--we had to improvise." The result is a debut collection that both beguiles and wounds, whose sky is "black at noon, black in the afternoon."

    From his earliest years, he writes in “Will,” he had “the gift of impermanence / so I would be ready, / accompanied / by a rage to prove them wrong / . . . and that I too was worthy of love.” This rage comes coupled with the poet’s own brand of love, what he calls “one / strange alone / heart’s wish / to help all / hearts.” Poetry is indeed Wright’s help, and he delivers it to us with a wry sense of the daily in America: in his wonderfully local relationship to God (whom he encounters along with a catfish in the emerald shallows of Walden Pond); in the little West Virginia motel of the title poem, on the banks of the great Ohio River, where “Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee” and he is visited by the figure of Walt Whitman, “examining the tear on a dead face.”Here, in Wheeling Motel, Wright’s poetry continues to surprise us with its frank appraisal of our soul, and with his own combustible loneliness and unstoppable joy.

    This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

    The anthology offers more poetry by women (40 new poets), with special attention to early women poets. The book also includes a greater diversity of American poetry, with double the number of poems by African American, Hispanic, native American and Asian American poets. There are 26 new poets representing the Commonwealth literature tradition: now included are more than 37 poets from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Caribbean, South Africa and India.

    With language delicate, smooth, and wryly funny, Louise is on a voyage without destination, traveling with a cast of enigmatic others, including her lover, Ham. Louise is as musical as she is mysterious and the reader is invited to listen. In her world, anything goes, provided it is breathtaking. Bang, whose first collection was the prize-winning Apology for Want, both parodies and pays homage to the lyric tradition, borrowing its lush music and dramatic structure to give new voice to the old concerns of the late Romantic poets. Louise in Love is a dramatic postmodern verse-novel with an eloquent free-floating narration. The poems, rife with literary allusion, take journeys to distant lands. And, like anyone on a voyage without a destination, they are endlessly questioning of the enigmatic world around them.

    But distinguished poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland have produced a clear, super-helpful book that unravels part of the mystery of great poems through an engaging exploration of poetic structure. Strand and Boland begin by promising to "look squarely at some of the headaches" of poetic form: the building blocks of poetry. The Making of a Poem gradually cures many of those headaches.Strand, who's won the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship and has served as U.S. Poet Laureate, and Boland, an abundantly talented Irish poet who has also written a beautiful book of essays on writing and womanhood, are both accustomed to teaching. Strand, now at the University of Chicago, and Boland, a Stanford professor, draw upon decades in the classroom to anticipate most questions.Ever wonder what a pantoum is? A villanelle? A sestina? With humor, patience, and personal anecdotes, Strand and Boland offer answers. But the way they answer is what makes this book stand out. The forms are divided into three overarching categories: metrical forms, shaping forms, and open forms. "Metrical forms" include the sonnet, pantoum, and heroic couplet. "Shaping forms" explains broader categories, like the elegy, ode, and pastoral poem. And "open forms" offers new takes on the traditional blueprints, exploring poems like Allen Ginsberg's "America."Each established form is then approached in three ways, followed by several pages of outstanding poems in that form. First, the editors offer a "page at a glance" guide, with five or six characteristics of that specific form presented in a brief outline. For example, the pantoum is defined like this:   1) Each pantoum stanza must be four lines long.   2) The length is unspecified but the pantoum must begin and end with the same line.   3) The second and fourth lines of the first quatrain become the first and third line of the next, and so on with succeeding quatrains.   4) The rhyming of each quatrain is abab.   5) The final quatrain changes this pattern.   6) In the final quatrain the unrepeated first and third lines are used in reverse as second and fourth lines.With this outline, it's easy to identify the looping pantoum. In the second piece of the pantoum section, Strand and Boland include a "History of the Form" section, again condensed to one page. Here, we learn that the pantoum is "Malayan in origin and came into English, as so many other strict forms have, through France." Indeed, both Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire tried their hands at the pantoum. As always, Strand and Boland offer some comparison to the other forms, which helps explain why a poet might choose to write a pantoum over, say, a sonnet or a sestina:"Of all verse forms the pantoum is the slowest. The reader takes four steps forward, then two steps back. It is the perfect form for the evocation of a past time." Next, the editors include "The Contemporary Context," which introduces several of the pantoums of this century. Finally, in what may be the book's best feature, they provide a close-up of a pantoum, an approach they repeat for each form discussed. In this case, it's the "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice. The editors offer some biographical information on Justice, and then they map out how that specific poem gets its power. This "poet's explanation" of the workings of a poem is invaluable, especially when it comes from leading poets such as Stand and Boland. What's more, these remarks are transferable. Reading how Strand and Boland view a dozen poems transforms the way one reads. With any future poem, you can look for what Strand and Boland have found in the greats.The editors offer their readers a great start, with a list for further reading and a helpful glossary. If anything can get a person excited about poetry, this selection of poems can -- though the editors, as working poets, readily admit their choices are idiosyncratic. Gems here include the best work of lesser-known poets, including several "poets' poets." For example, Edward Thomas, a prominent reviewer in his day and a close friend of Robert Frost's, is represented by "Rain," an absolutely brilliant blank-verse poem which begins:      Rain, midnight rain, nothing but wild rain      On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me      Remembering again that I shall die      And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks      For washing me cleaner than I have been       Since I was born into this solitude. Thomas's poem -- and other treasures here -- introduces readers to what and how poets read to learn to make poems. Of course, many of the usual suspects are found here, but the surprises are exciting, and even the old favorites seem new when the editors explain why and how a particular poem seems beautiful. This is particularly evident in their discussion of Edna St. Vincent Millay's rushing, initially breathless sonnet "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and How, " which reads:      What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,      I have forgotten, and what arms have lain      Under my head till morning, but the rain      Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh      Upon the glass and listen for reply,       And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain      For unremembered lads that not again      Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.       Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree      Nor knows what birds have vanquished one by one,      Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:       I cannot say what loves have come and gone,       I only know that summer sang in me      A little while, that in me sings no more. In the "close-up" section, Strand and Boland offer an biographical paragraph that mentions that in 1923, Millay became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They then discuss Millay's "distinctive and unusual" approach to the sonnet form: "Instead of taking the more leisurely pace of the public sonnet that had been the 19th-century model, she drove her sonnets forward with a powerful lyric music and personal emphasis."The editors point out Millay's heavy reliance on assonance and alliteration, and then note how she takes advantage of the different tempos the sonnet offers:"Here she uses her distinctive music and high diction to produce an unusually quick-paced poem in the first octave and then a slower, more reflective septet where the abandoned lover becomes a winter tree. This ability of the sonnet, to accommodate both lyric and reflective time, made it a perfect vehicle for highly intuitive twentieth-century poets like Millay."That simple explanation of the sonnet as a form able to "accommodate both lyric and reflective time" helps clarify most sonnets. But Strand and Boland are careful not to explain everything. The deepest beauty, as they explain in their introductory essays on their attraction to form, is built on mystery. And it is that attempt to understand the greatest mysteries that defines the greatest poems. Similarly, mystery often drives poets to write, as Strand explains in his essay on Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell," which Strand describes as the first poem he wished he had written himself in his early years as a poet:"Although I no longer wish I had written 'You, Andrew Marvell,' I wish, however, that I could write something like it, something with its sweep, its sensuousness, its sad crepuscular beauty, something capable of carving out such a large psychic space for itself&. There is something about it that moves me in ways I don't quite understand, as it were communicating more than what it actually says. This is often the case with good poems -- they have a lyric identity that goes beyond whatever their subject happens to be."With this book, Strand and Boland help quantify the explicable parts of a "lyric identity." Understanding form, the editors believe, is one way to begin understanding a poem's beauty. This lucid, useful book is a wonderful guide to that mysterious music.—Aviya Kushner

    The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

    Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, "Daylilies on the Hill 1975 - 1989," moves back to the happy repossession of the poet's old family house and its history - a structure that "persisted against assaults" as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing - "mania is melancholy reversed," as Hall writes in another long poem, "Kill the Day." In this book's fourth and final section, "Ardor," the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.

    Linda Pastan writes, "the art that mattered / was the life led fully / stanza by swollen stanza." That life is portrayed here, from memories of the poet's earliest childhood and the ambiguities of marriage and love to the surprises that come with age, always with a consciousness of what is happening in the larger world.

    Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love.

    The newly titled Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry now available in two paperback volumes includes 1,596 poems by 195 poets (half of the poems are new), from Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy in the late nineteenth century to Anne Carson and Sherman Alexie in the twenty-first. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry continues to be the most comprehensive collection of twentieth-century poetry in English. It richly represents the major figures, while also giving full voice to ethnic American poetries, experimental traditions, postcolonial poetry, and the long poem, eclipsing all other anthologies in scope, clarity, and balance."