Every month we dig through review copies, talk to booksellers, and survey our peers to find books to recommend to different audiences.

02.07.08

Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow
by Joyce Sidman, Beth Krommes (illustrator)
Houghton Mifflin
$16.00
From the scratchboard illustrations to the poems presented as riddles, an air of mystery envelops this picture book about meadow life. What comes “[i]n the dark . . . in the leaf-crisp air just before sunlight”? Who hides in “bubbles of pearl, all in a clustery, bubbly swirl”? Which meadow visitors are “the tall ones with crowns of velvet”? Six- to ten-year-old naturalists—and grasshopper chasers of all ages—will enjoy guessing the answers to author Joyce Sidman’s enticing questions. (Dew, spittlebugs, and deer, if you must know.) Beth Krommes’ colorful, detailed pictures reveal clues, and Sidman also intersperses helpful bits of factual prose between the poems. Butterfly Eyes was named Best Poetry Book of 2006 by the Children’s and Young Adult Bloggers Literary Awards, and Sidman’s other works, including Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems and Meow Ruff: A Story in Concrete Poetry, have also landed on a number of “best of” lists. (Song of the Water Boatman won a Caldecott honor for its art, by Beckie Prange.) It’s no secret that the smart match of delightful wordplay, science, and art make Butterfly Eyes a must-have for nature-loving children.

06.19.07

Good Sports: Rhymes about Running, Jumping, Throwing, and More
Jack Prelutsky illustrated by Chris Raschka
Alfred A. Knopf
$16.00
Children’s Poet Laureate Jack Prelutsky has penned an energetic assortment of 17 poems on popular sports as varied as baseball, karate, and, even, Frisbee tossing. Boys and girls are featured both as winning athletes and hopeful wannabes in appealing rhymes that capture the motion and emotion of vigorous physical activity and team competition. The strong staccato rhythms invite children to read aloud, or even chant or shout as if they were at a sporting event, and the vivid, fluid, Matisse-like illustrations by Caldecott Medal winner Chris Raschka pull the reader from poem to poem. Good Sports is the perfect summer book for children eager to get outside and try a new sport.

05.10.07

Blue Colonial
David Roderick
The American Poetry Review
$14.00
Chosen by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky as the winner of this year’s APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Blue Colonial takes a meditative approach to history. Born and raised in Plymouth, Massachusetts, David Roderick explores his own and New England’s conflicted past. The intersection of time, history, and memory is most beautifully rendered in the title poem. A blue colonial in a subdivision sits in front of a woods where the speaker retreats to pull trash from a ditch. He then recalls a girl from the colonial past who survived a fall through the ice at a nearby pond, and admires “how everything she touched, // living or dead, spun into a string of light.” With a lyric yet reticent voice, Roderick’s poems illuminate how poetry as well as history turn “a pile of junk” into “a kind of faith.” As Pinsky writes in his introduction, “The past is hard to know,” but for Roderick, it has a presence that invites you to “get lost enough to find yourself.”

12.06.06

Santa Got Stuck in the Chimney
Kenn Nesbitt by Kenn Nesbitt and Linda Knaus (illustrated by Mike and Carl Gordon)
Meadowbrook Press
$9.95
The holiday terrain is well traveled, but Nesbitt and Knaus show they can cut their own path. Accompanied by illustrations that could have come straight from the Sunday funnies, all of Santa’s lore is fair game: the Christmas tree blushes from its garish decorations, and Santa’s poor shaving skills are the real reason he’s called St. Nick. There’s also a laudable formal range here, including “Snow Day,” a poem composed totally of rhyming two-syllable lines: “Sled bent. Fred’s head / got dent. / Poor Fred. // He cried. / Now plays / inside/ snow days.” Funny and first-rate.

10.18.06

A Word Like Fire: Selected Poems
Dick Barnes
Handsel Books
$17.00
An unlikable child, the emptiness of the Mojave Desert, a father’s disappointment in his son, humility, and faith are subjects for these poems, culled from Dick Barnes’s three previous little-known collections. Clear, common language is worked into sure-footed free verse. An injured hawk retains its wildness as the hunter nurses it in his basement: “Nailed to the tree / Jesus must have been as still as that, / that wild.” A father tends highways in the desert, where scarce people and storms are visible as they approach: you could get “out of the way if you wanted to / but nobody did.” Images are savored at a measured pace, and return casually, surprisingly, to reveal their rightness: “An early bee amid eucalyptus blossoms / took on more nectar than she could carry: // not that it was heavy, but so cold. . . .”

10.18.06

Paul Celan: Selections
Paul Celan edited by Pierre Joris
University of California Press
$17.95
Paul Celan is considered by many to be the most important German-language poet of the last century, and his work has already been translated numerous times. This edition, edited by Pierre Joris (highly regarded as both an anthologist and a translator), is unique in that it includes poems from seven translators, displaying their varied approaches to Celan’s often idiosyncratic work. Celan’s poems—filled with word play, neologisms, and fractured syntax—present a distinct challenge to translators. This edition allows readers to get a fuller sense of the possibilities of Celan’s work than they can from a single translator. The book also provides a stockpile of supplementary texts (making up more than half of the pages), all aimed at offering the reader a point of entry into this sometimes difficult work. The supplementary texts draw from Celan’s own writings about his work, personal remembrances of him, and scholarly dissections. The many translators and supplemental texts make this edition an excellent introduction to Celan.

10.18.06

Journey to the Lost City
Jonathan Aaron
Ausable Press
$14.00
In Jonathan Aaron’s third book of poetry, nostalgia for the past becomes a kind of twilight zone. Memories of childhood and recounted history blur with stashed images from popular movies and TV, and with serious art such as Kurt Schwitters’s Dadaist collages. As directed by Aaron, family members, artists, and film noir stars replay scenes on the poems’ set, but always with a twist. Mr. Moto, aka Peter Lorre, quotes Pascal and confesses his real identity as Laszlo Lowenstein, an Eastern European emigrant. A scene of faked passion from another B movie ends with the poet waking to his five-year-old self and to the aftermath of World War II: “Half the world is lying in ruins.” The reader becomes “the ghost of whoever leans in for a closer look” at Aaron’s world, and finds identity and imagination forever entangled and fused.

06.01.06

Classic Rough News
Kenneth Fields
University of Chicago Press
$17.00
A book of sonnets and sonnetlike lyrics, Classic Rough News follows a few struggling characters—a heavy-drinking Vietnam vet, a frustrated scholar, the author—in a sardonic, black-comedy spirit. Fields has enough cynicism to kill a horse, and watching his wit play against the characters’ predicaments quickly becomes the book’s subject. The best witticism of all, though, is that the poems are able, by degrees, to find their way through irony, skepticism, and wryness to genuine human warmth.

06.01.06

Education by Stone
João Cabral de Melo Neto Tr. by Richard Zenith
Archipelego Books
$16.00
Taking their cue from Marianne Moore and Francis Ponge, these selected poems of Brazilian writer João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920–1999) approach art with the methodical mind of the engineer or the architect, which “sees the world just / as it is, without any veils.” Cabral is “educated by stone,” finding in it a model of durability, compactness, and impersonality; he lays his lines like masonry on the cane fields, rivers, and cemeteries of northeastern Brazil. The result fulfils Cabral’s ambition for a poetry “heavy with reality, dirty with the coarse realities of the outside world,” and will appear both familiar and enlarging to American readers.

06.01.06

Sojourner
Gillian Allnutt
Bloodaxe Books
$23.95
Still waters run deep in the sixth collection of British poet Gillian Allnutt. Her latest poems rise out of a quiet inner life and a “waste not, want not” approach to language, and find their texture in the speech and landscapes of northeast England. Allnutt’s silences and hesitations keep her from indulging in any kind of oratory, and imbue her writing with the authority to range, in its stuttering, ascetic way, as widely as her mind: to art, to history, and to the lives of people like and unlike herself.

06.01.06

Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant
by Jack Prelutsky, Carin Berger (illustrator)
Greenwillow Books / HarperCollins
$17.89
Popular children’s author and poet Jack Prelutsky plays on children’s love for jokes, riddles, and games in this book of clownish and clever animal-object hybrids. These witty creations—such as the clocktopus and the ballpoint penguin—are animated by Prelutsky’s sing-song rhymes that are pleasing both to say and to hear. Berger’s excellent illustrations carry the hybrid concept further with playful and imaginative collages.

06.01.06

Flamingos on the Roof
Calef Brown Poems and paintings
Houghton Mifflin
$16.00
Calef Brown gives young readers another glimpse into his wacky brain in this latest, joyful journey stamped with his unmistakable style: his zany poems, his good sense for color, his smart and funny paintings—even down to his font. Brown’s imagination flourishes in the silly—order thunder loud from Weatherbee’s Diner—and also in the Classics, such as the story of Medusa, who is introduced along with her sister Sally, whose “curse is even worse— / she makes you stop and talk.” His sophisticated style finds a meter and then breaks it, rhymes, riffs on pop songs, and makes this book a great pleasure for both children and adults.

05.01.06

In the Middle Distance
Linda Gregg
Graywolf Press
$14.00
The poems in Linda Gregg’s sixth collection are bleached and elegant. Written from a life set apart and stripped of convention (“Women have houses now, and children. / I live alone in a kind of luxury.”), the poems find analogs in the southwest Texas desert (a hawk gripping a snake, wind and silence after a passing train) for her elemental subject matter—to present the “accurate and unexpected beauty” of being and loving what fades. In “Elegance,” the speaker comes across an abandoned house “Left alone in the stillness / in that pure silence married / to the stillness of nature. / A door off its hinges, / shade and shadows in an empty room. Leaks for light. Raw where the tin roof rusted through.”

05.01.06

Blue Front
Martha Collins
Graywolf Press
$14.00
Collins’s sixth collection revolves around the 1909 lynching of a black man and, later, a white man in Cairo, Illinois, in front of 10,000 spectators, including the five-year-old who would later become her father. Extensively researched, the book is composed of a variety of forms—the sonnet, the chart, the list—that incorporate facts from newspapers, census records, testimonials, and biographies to compile a fragmented narrative that is every bit as compelling as a crime novel. The jump cuts, repetition, and elisions create a violent stutter, as in the poem “shoot,” which begins: “to kill. to more than kill. to kill again / and again and again.”

05.01.06

The Book For My Brother
Tomaz Salamun
Harvest Books
$16.00
Salamun’s latest collection begins with a sighting of the devil—who “licks everything before killing it”—and travels the world, setting down in Russia, on the banks of the Nile, in Tashkent, and in New York City, asking of a disordered world what it might mean to act humanely. Of the “raucous black sky,” he asks, “why did you swallow / my proof?” And of the eponymous amphibians in “Questions for Little Frogs,” “Are you composed of little fruit pits? / Are you a tree too, the way we are?” Though a sudden shift in tone can quickly turn a poem dark, Salamun’s poetry is full of hope, as he declares: “Not a single hair without // love. Every dust and a millimeter of a nail has / its own love history.”

05.01.06

Poems 1955-2005
Anne Stevenson
Dufour Editions
$64.95cloth; $29.95 paper
Few poets have been sufficiently prolific and wide-ranging in both theme and form to arrange their selected poems as one would an anthology. And if they had, we’d surely know of them. But most of us, at least on this side of the Atlantic, don’t know Anne Stevenson’s work. Born and raised in the United States, Stevenson moved to England in the 1950s, where she has written more than 15 volumes of poetry, a collection of essays, and critical volumes on Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop. Whether writing lyrics about family matters, fens, North Sea gannets, or a backhoe tearing up a roadway, or longer narratives such as her masterpiece Correspondences, which chronicles two centuries of a New England family, her style is terse, cool, and harmonic, her imagery as resonant and exacting as Bishop’s, and her meanings as fiercely honest as Plath’s. From “Swifts”: “These are the pilgrims, pilots of air rivers: / a shift of wing, and they’re earth-skimmers, daggers, / skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.”

05.01.06

World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions
Ed. by Eliot Weinberger
New Directions
$14.95
“How magnificent the war is!” announces exiled Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail in this world literature anthology. Weinberger (a noted essayist and translator of Borges, Bei Dao, and others) has culled 24 poets from the New Directions catalog, creating, as he puts it in the volume’s introduction, “an endless net of individual dialogues . . . between writers and readers, regardless of governments, nations, and communal identities.” Familiar names—Robert Creeley, Octavio Paz, Inger Christensen—rub against the likes of Mikhail (now living in Detroit) and Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku, whose charged lyrics are marked by sharp tonal shifts that evince an international influence, as in these lines: “Out of boredom / footsteps consume the streets / with the hunger of Chaplin in a silent film. / Out of boredom the soul, like an amoeba, / expands and divides / so that it will no longer be alone.”

05.01.06

District and Circle
Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$20.00
Forty years after Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney launched his career by recounting his Irish childhood in poems, he’s back “making the rounds,” visiting and singing of the rural characters (fireman, butcher, peat digger) and objects (pump, anvil, turnip shredder, stove lid, axes) that populate his district in Ireland (though the poem’s title refers to the District and Circle route of the London Underground). His workmanlike melodies, steady as a hammer stroke, meld a mythic Irish past and his own childhood to the present, fraught moment: “Panicked snipe offshooting into twilight, / Then going awry, larks quietened in the sun, / Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain.”

04.01.06

Gathering Ground
Edited by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady
University of Michigan Press
$19.95
More than 100 poets carry on a conversation in this anthology celebrating the 10th anniversary of Cave Canem, a nonprofit founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to encourage and develop African American poetry talent through lectures, workshops, and a first-book contest. Gathering Ground creates a discussion crossing generational and aesthetic lines. Young writers—Tracy K. Smith and Kyle Dargan among them—riff on the political and cultural idioms laid down by major contemporary figures such as Michael Harper and Sonia Sanchez. This cultural politics finds expression in such poems as Harryette Mullen's "Drinking Mojitos in Cuba Libre," which concludes its recipe for a mojito with the direction to "Stir briskly with a drop of African blood."

04.01.06

Look There: New and Selected Poems
Agi Mishol Tr. by Lisa Katz
Graywolf Press
$14.00
Israeli poet Agi Mishol has long been lauded as the heir to Yehuda Amichai because her poetry grapples with contradictions in Israeli life through a similar unflinching gaze and moral intelligence. Translator Lisa Katz chose wisely from Mishol's 12 books of poetry, varying longer poems about a suicide bombing of a Jewish bakery and the deaths of the poet's Holocaust-survivor parents with shorter ones on a variety of subjects, including Rabin's assassination, men and love, and the modernizing landscape of the Holy Land (olive trees in Home Depot containers)—all rendered in Mishol's characteristically plainspoken, wry tone.

04.01.06

Poet's Choice
Edward Hirsch
Harcourt
$25.00
The timing and assignment were routine: every week from 2002 to 2006, Edward Hirsch wrote about a single poem in "Poet's Choice," his column published in the Washington Post Book World. Now gathered into one book, the columns are a delightful read because of their unpredictable topics, which include introducing international poets to American audiences, mourning the death of fellow poets, praising first books, and exploring an idea such as poetry's capacity to respond to suffering. Part referral service for contemporary poetry, part mini-lecture series on its biographical, historical, and literary roots, this book will succeed in finding new readers for many of the poems and poets it introduces.

04.01.06

nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she
Sawako Nakayasu
Quale Press
$12.00
The last lines of Nakayasu's third full-length collection provide a key to her book's methods: "keeps a catalogue of forgettable sounds—an interminable documentary, as if to forget anything completely was impossible to desire." The speaker in these poems may be the one referenced in the title, "she." The subjects here are unnamed women in the midst of thinking, acting, and being acted upon. The experiment here is less a formal one—the book is composed of mostly short prose fragments—than one of perception, and Nakayasu's cinematic approach carefully catalogues mundane dailiness with such attention as to render it unfamiliar and often hilarious: "eats potato chip crumbs off the floor, with an emphasis at times on eating chips, at times on keeping the floor clean."

04.01.06

Samuel Beckett: Grove Centenary Edition
Samuel Beckett , edited by Paul Auster
Grove Press.
$100.00
To celebrate Samuel Beckett's 100th birthday, Grove Press has published a centenary edition of the Nobel Prize winner's works. The four-volume hardcover set features the Beckett staples: the trilogy of novels, Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; the plays, including Waiting for Godot and Endgame; and the short fiction and criticism. It also collects 30 of his poems, including the full text of Echo's Bones, the only volume of poetry he ever published. Devout followers will already be familiar with the ribald tone and esoteric referencing of these mostly early-career works; the reader new to his poems will discover rich linguistic pleasures and a haunt of images, like this from "Enueg I": "a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer."

04.01.06

Poetry Speaks to Children
edited by Elise Paschen; Judy Love, Wendy Rasmussen, and Paula Zinngrave Wendland (illustrators)
Sourcebooks

A wonderful nonstandard edition of poetry for children selected from both classic and great contemporary poets. Shakespeare, Pope, and Yeats are found in these pages, as are Maxine Kumin, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks. The poems are fun and appealing, and rich in word and sound play. The illustrations are appropriately engaging. But the accompanying CD featuring many of the poets reading their own poems is the particular pleasure here.

03.01.06

Luck is Luck
Lucia Perillo
Random House
$19.95
A recent winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, this fourth collection is sure to bring attention to Perillo's work. Her wry, associative narratives on subjects both quirky (nudism in America, the suicide rate among dentists) and traditional (nature, family, aging, and death) are always funny and deeply felt.

03.01.06

The Hurtling
John Witte
Orchises Press
$14.95
Twenty-seven years after the publication of Witte's first book, Loving the Days, the poems in The Hurtling dispense with punctuation in breathless, asymmetrical tercets. Biblical cadences brush against earthly experiences, as in this, from "Pilgrimage": "I remember the moonlit / rush of farms and meadows past the train to Barcelona // a small hand / slipping into your purse a loss / we carried within us unaware walking block after block // to the church."

03.01.06

Star Dust
Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$20.00
In Star Dust, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award, Bidart fixes his analytic gaze on our primal need to invent, whether an identity, a family, or an art form. By turns intelligent, disturbing, honest, and riveting, his poems stage how the urge to create is often thwarted, turns destructive, or remains unrealized. The book's long poem—"The Third Hour of the Night," about Benvenuto Cellini, the renegade Renaissance goldsmith and sculptor—is a dazzling performance.

03.01.06

Given: Poems
Wendell Berry
Shoemaker & Hoard
$14.00
Berry's first book of poetry in 10 years collects his haikus, short lyrics, a verse play, and his meditations from weekly Sunday walks along rivers and through the pastures and woods of his Kentucky home. Whether about neighbors, politics, nature, the writing life, or aging, Berry's poems are full of clarity and grace.

03.01.06

Range of Voices: A Collection of Contemporary Poets
Tod Marshall
Eastern Washington University Press
$19.95
As the title implies, the 20 poets collected here represent a range of aesthetics and subject matter. Li-Young Lee's succulent narratives, which move "blossom to blossom to / impossible blossom," converse with Gillian Conoley's disjunctive, imagistic meditations, where "one bee turned wild buzzes on the long thread / of late sun." A companion to Marshall's previous collection of interviews with each of the included poets, Range of Voices also features Yusef Komunyakaa, Linda Bierds, Claudia Keelan, and five previously unpublished poems by Robert Hass. Marshall succinctly contextualizes each selection in brief but illuminating introductions.

02.01.02

Migration: New & Selected Poems
W. S. Merwin
Copper Canyon Press
$40.00
Winner of the National Book Award, Migration bridges five decades of Merwin's work. His early formal efforts quietly anticipate his eerie, apocalyptic mythologies of the 1960s, which in turn echo through the elegiac, environmental poems of the last two decades. The new poems about everyday objects are a further refinement of Merwin's plainspoken yet philosophical lyricism.

02.01.02

The Maverick Room
Thomas Sayers Ellis
Graywolf Press
$14.00
In his long-awaited debut collection, Dark Room Collective co-founder Thomas Sayers Ellis has put together a fake book, of sorts, of the Washington D.C., of his youth. The play on display in these musically rich poems borrows from sources as diverse as Gertrude Stein and George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars, in vitalizing riffs that shift between homage and critique, between the domestic and the political. Ellis revels in the humor afforded by the slippage of a simple word or phrase, but he can turn serious on a dime: "Album cover your ears / and come in and throw down."

02.01.02

The Niagara River
Kay Ryan
Grove Press.
$13.00
In her sixth collection, 2004 Lilly Prize winner Kay Ryan continues to refine her quick and maneuverable style. Short on verbiage and long on observation, the poems plumb domestic, natural, and interior situations for fragments of catch-as-catch-can wisdom. The results are condensed, eccentric fables about experiences Ryan is determined not to take for granted.

02.01.02

The Displaced of Capital
Anne Winters
University Of Chicago Press
$14.00
In her first book since the 1986 collection The Key to the City, Anne Winters again turns her attention to New York City and its "displaced"—its immigrants and exhausted workers in precarious, hand-to-mouth circumstances. Writing in a sharp, ornate style, Winters arranges the city's incidental beauties and brutalities with an eye to human suffering. Mannequins posing in Fifth Avenue shop windows, ten-year-old drug scouts, tenements hard by posh apartment towers—the New York of these poems determinedly mixes its elements of high and low.

02.01.02

Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
Edited by Arnold Rampersad
Oxford University Press
$32.50
Dispensing with the anthology standard of chronological arrangement, Rampersad has organized the latest Oxford anthology into thematic slices, creating extended meditations on topics such as music, religion, slavery, and protest. The volume reconfigures the African-American poetic tradition by introducing several voices fairly new on the scene—Harryette Mullen, Patricia Smith, and Kevin Young among them—to the likes of Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka.

02.01.02

A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children
edited by Caroline Kennedy
Hyperion / Hyperion Books for Children
$19.95
Caroline Kennedy follows her best-selling poetry anthology for adults with this collection of time-honored classics for children. In a nice touch, poems by Dickinson, Cummings, Plath, and many more sit alongside matching paintings by Jon Muth—appealing to readers and listeners of all ages.