Articles by Peggy Rosenthal

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been taking down from my poetry shelves poets I haven’t read in a long time. The most recent I’ve reached for is Wallace Stevens. When I opened his Collected Poems, my first instinct was to turn to the famous “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” But then I thought: No, these are early poems. I wonder what Stevens’s late poems are like. So I flipped to the back of the book — and was fascinated by what I found there.

Karl Shapiro was a leading poet of his time: winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for his collection V-Letter and Other Poems, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1946-1947, editor of Poetry magazine from 1950 to 1954. And he was included in the 1956 anthology Fifteen Modern American Poets, along with poets like Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Theodore Roethke.

Canadian poet Richard Osler’s new poetry volume, What Holiness Can I Bring? is shadowed by death. Several poems express his grief over the death of a close friend. Then while Osler was in the midst of writing the poems that became this book, he learned that his own death was near: he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. So, naturally, he began composing poems on this diagnosis and its implications.

I’m browsing my poetry shelves looking for poets I haven’t read in a while. And there, practically jumping into my hand, is E. E. Cummings’s Poems 1923-1954. I also found him in both my editions of The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950 and 1976). And right away in the Oxford selections I come to his poem about driving his new car.

In July 2024, Pope Francis issued an extraordinary 5000-word Pastoral Letter titled “On the Role of Literature in Formation.” At first, he says, he’d thought of addressing it to people engaged in pastoral work, including of course priests; but then he realized that his audience should be all Christians—because his subject was “the value of reading novels and poems as part of one’s path to personal maturity.”

Scott Cairns’s new poetry collection, just published by Slant Books, is called Correspondence with My Greeks. The title is intriguing. “Correspondence,” of course, has a dual meaning: “communicating with” but also “connection or similarity to.” I think both meanings are at play in this collection. What Cairns gives us in this volume are seventy-eight such conversations (correspondences) as connections.

The title poem of Suzanne Nussey’s debut poetry collection, Slow Walk Home, comes at the end of the book’s first section, called “My Father’s House.” In the poem “Slow walk home,” she is a young child walking with her father on his weekly visits to parishioners. On their way back home, she muses ominously “This day / an empty tablet not yet tipped / toward calamity.”

In The New Yorker’s May 27, 2024, issue, Kathryn Schulz has a fascinating article called “Wait For It: Suspense in Literature and Life.” Her thesis is that every kind of literature—not just murder mysteries—is full of suspense. “In fact, outside of phone books and instruction manuals, it’s almost impossible to find a written work that doesn’t make use of suspense to captivate its readers.

Since October 7, 2023, the world has been focused on the Holy Land. And not in a positive or hopeful way. So what better time for Bret Lott’s latest book—Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land—to come out? As he notes in his foreword, Lott delivered the manuscript to his publisher in the summer of 2023, when it was possible to find in Israel the subtitle’s “hope.” And find it he does.

In Commonwealth, Patchett does her storytelling in a way that captures how things in our own lives jumble in our minds. She has managed in this novel to create, in a most engaging way, a story—no, multiple stories—that feel uncannily true to the ways that we experience life.

For my birthday, my sister sent me The Carrying, the 2018 collection of poems by Ada Limón, current U.S. Poet Laureate. I hadn’t read Limón’s poetry before, and found that getting to know it was very moving. The poems drew me into themselves, into the depths of Limón’s recurrent joys and concerns.

For decades I had read and studied poetry. After all, my doctorate had been in literature. But I’d previously read in order to analyze, as I had intended to do that day in the hammock in order to write the review. Was it the hammock’s swaying suspension, its relaxing of my bodily and mental tautness, that released me into poetry’s expansive, prayerful space?

Matthew Porto’s debut poetry volume, Moon Grammar (just published by Slant Books), is an intriguing collection. In three Parts, titled “The Angel,” “The Wanderer,” and “Endings,” Porto engages biblical narratives, travels in space and time, and finalities. All in all, Moon Garden’s poems give us a unique entry into what human life is about: its astonishments, its darknesses, its mysteries.

I’ve always preferred The Odyssey to The Iliad—preferring adventurous peace to adventurous war. But when I heard good things about Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad, I decided to buy it. I wasn’t sorry. I’d say that Wilson’s translation is a perfect balance between common speech and the grandness appropriate for this story of great heroes.

Among my favorite activities are writing, reading, and knitting. So when my sister told me about an essay collection with the aptly punned title, Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, I of course bought it immediately. Here were three of my top pastimes all together: I could read what well-known writers wrote about their knitting experiences.

Accessible yet mysterious: that’s my overall impression of Olga Sedakova’s poems in the volume Old Songs, published by Slant Books this month. Published, I should add, in English translation—with each poem printed also in the original Russian. Sedakova published this collection in Russia (actually then the Soviet Union) in the early 1980s, but it’s just now appearing in this English translation by Martha Kelly.

I can’t remember what moved me to pick up David Whyte’s recently revised Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words; but I’m having trouble putting it down. With the Table of Contents a list of common words in alphabetical order—and with a flip-through showing three to ten paragraphs per entry—you might think you’ve got in your hands a sort of dictionary. But you’ve got nothing of the sort.

Novels are my bedtime reading. I especially like very long novels—so that there’s an already familiar world I can re-enter each night. So when I decided to take Swann’s Way off my shelf and up to bed with me, I knew I was in for months of Proust’s unique world created in the seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past.

I think the closest close reading I’ve ever come across is the 2014 book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, by political philosopher Danielle Allen. Notice that I didn’t say that this close reading is “in the book.” No, the entire book itself is a close reading.

I suppose it’s sort of incestuous to write a blog post about another blog. But so be it. And anyway, Richard Osler’s website Recovering Words is much more than a blog. It does include posts. But the site also features descriptions of retreats that Richard offers on poetry as prayer, on poetry writing, and on poetry for recovering addicts; quotes by a range of writers about poetry; poems by some of his favorite poets; some of his own poetry; and more.