Scott Cairns’s latest poetry collection, Against Certainty, just published by Slant Books, is his twelfth book of poems. Cairns touches on many motifs in this new book—including “nous” (or the mind), travel, and his cancer. But for this post I want to focus on the major theme that runs through the collection: prayer.
I’m enchanted by Richard Chess’s new poetry collection, The Loneliest Monk. And by the loneliest monk himself. Though not all the poems are about this (imagined) monk, I want to focus here on some that are—or at least seem to be. Chess, I should say at the start, is not a monk. But he is a practicing Jew and a poet often reaching for the mystical—qualities that his loneliest monk character shares.
If you asked me who my favorite contemporary comic poet is, I wouldn’t hesitate a second. It’s Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. Not that all his poems are comic—but those are the ones I keep returning to, the ones I’ll talk about in this post. Actually, comedy isn’t easy to talk about. But I think it will help if I offer you some of what I see as Collins’s favorite categories of poems.
Phyllis Wheatley’s 18th century poem piqued my curiosity about subsequent American poets of “sable race”—especially women. So I went to The Poetry Foundation website (my go-to source for poets and poems) and spent several enjoyable days searching for and reading these poets.
I’m reading Robert Cording’s latest poetry collection, What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems. In the “Selected Poems” sections, we get a survey of Cording’s long, celebrated poetic career, ranging from Life-List in 1987 through Without My Asking in 2019. Cording actually published a subsequent book that he doesn’t include selections from: In the Unwalled City (2022). The reason for this omission is that the section of “New” poems in What’s Possible continues the theme of the 2022 collection: Cording’s grief over the recent death of his thirty-one-year-old son, Daniel.
About a year ago, a friend recommended to me Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel The Summer Book, saying it was the most perfect piece of writing he’d ever experienced. So of course I bought it right away—but have just now gotten around to reading it. Yes, it’s extraordinary—and unlike any other fiction I’ve read. It’s not really a novel in the usual sense. It’s a serious of vignettes, from two to twelve pages each.
John Poch’s new book of poems, “The Future of Love,” is so full of riches that I can’t possibly do them all justice in this post. So I’m going to focus on three of the book’s main motifs: Spain, colors, and love. Poch has clearly spent considerable time in Spain. It’s referred to or is even the setting for over fourteen of the book’s poems.
The binding of my 1988 paperback edition of Czeslaw Milosz’s The Collected Poems is drying out, so that some sections of pages are coming apart. But what haven’t dried out are my many yellow post-its throughout the book—notes on various poems that especially spoke to me two or three decades ago. Many of these poems address in some way Milosz’s relation to God—which is what interests me for this post.
There’s no question that O.K./okay is an American coinage, going back to the mid-nineteenth century. I’ll touch below on the various theories of its origin, but first I want to give some evidence of what Mencken calls its “success.” In fact, without intending any hyperbole, he claims that O.K. is “the most successful abbreviation ever coined, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere.”
If I handed you an essay called “The Poet,” you’d likely expect an analysis of, say, the poet’s meter or imagery and symbolism. But if the essay is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet,” you won’t find any of this. Rather, you’ll read that “it is not meters but meter-making argument that makes a poem.” And “Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol.”
During the summer season, when local peaches are plentiful, as we’d finish dinner I’d ask my husband “Do you care to eat a peach?” I knew I was playing on the line “Do you dare to eat a peach?”—from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But after a while I realized that there was nothing else I remembered from that poem. I hadn’t read it in, literally, decades. So I pulled Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays from my bookshelf and opened the book.
I’ve been reaching into my poetry shelves to take out poets I haven’t read in decades. This week it was Theodore Roethke’s turn. Browsing his six poetry collections, I of course find an abundance of themes: his childhood and relation to his father, love of a woman, various dimensions of the self, and more. But the poems I’m most drawn to are the ones where he expresses what I’d call his mysticism— his longing for and then union with the divine.
When my neighbor, composer David Liptak, was visiting earlier in the summer. I asked what he was currently composing, and he said, “I’ve set two poems by Marianne Moore: ‘The Fish’ and ‘A Jelly-Fish.’” I wasn’t familiar with Moore’s poems, so I immediately got from the library Becoming Marianne More: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, and turned to David’s two poems.
It’s a dark poem; that’s for sure. Yet throughout, the poetry itself lessens the darkness. That recurring “have it,” the regular meter, the rhymings throughout (especially that “spaces”/“race is”), the alliterations, —these (to my mind) lighten the gloom. The poem is at once playful and deeply unsettling. Frost, in his mastery, truly has it both ways.
On the Poetry Foundation’s website page for Pattiann Rogers, we read that “She is noted for her ability to link the natural and scientific worlds in works filled with sensual imagery, spirituality, and a sense of awe.” And also that her books from 2004 through 2017 “continue to explore theological possibilities as revealed through the natural world.” Today, I want to follow this theme in a single volume: Generations (2004).
In his interview with Slant Books about his new poetry collection, titled Vanishments, Eric Pankey says: “In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance.”
Fr. Murray Bodo is now in his eighties, but in this new collection his creative mind is as rich and fertile as ever—as it ranges over such subjects as favorite museums; Easter, Christmas, and other seasons; his New Mexico childhood, his travels, his aging.
The poetry of Texas writer Vassar Miller (1924-1998) isn’t as well-known as it should be—because, critics suggest, she was writing religious verse in a decidedly secular age. But I’ve long treasured my copy of her collected poems, If I Had Wheels or Love (1991). Miller was born with cerebral palsy, and her disability naturally finds its way into some of her poems—but many more are grounded in her Christian faith. It’s these that I want to look at in this post.
I’ve been reading the poems in Gary Fincke’s new poetry collection, For Now, We Have Been Spared, recently published by Slant Books. The poems draw me in, lure me into sitting with them. I’m especially drawn to the seven “sequences” in the book: series of six to sixteen poems elaborating a particular motif. There’s no point in trying to dash through them all in a single post, so I’m going to focus on one that I find especially engaging. It’s called “Plummeting.”
Ever since I first read Pattiann Rogers’s poem “On the Way to Early Morning Mass” (in her 2001 collection Song of the World Becoming), I’ve been enthralled by it. But I haven’t tried to move through it slowly, line by line. That’s what I want to do in this post.