Poet’s Collections We Want To Share With You
One great recent collection of poetry is Fulbright scholar Jacqueline Bishop’s Snapshots From Istanbul. The subject of her sensuous and precise poems concern not only the time Bishop stayed in Istanbul — where she fell in frustrating and unrequited love with a Kurdish man — but speak of other artists in exile, like Ovid and Gaugin. Even a poem that focuses on the yellow color of rubber gloves the poet’s mother has left in her now immaculate bathroom resonates.
Another collection is Elegguas, elegies by the Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite. Though they are elegies, the poems are lively and profound, if a little hard on the eyes, as they are arranged in interesting ways on the page, with different fonts. Sometimes, words in a single poem have different fonts. Some poems look like they’d been scissored out of obituary columns. The effect is to slow the reader down, to make them truly appreciate and contemplate the poet’s words.
W.D. Snodgrass, a confessional poets who was a contemporary and friend of Anne Sexton, published his collection Needle of the Heart a while ago, but it still has the power to break the heart. The poems revolve around his divorce, and the grief he felt from being estranged from his young daughter. Speaking of Anne Sexton, her Love Poems are surprisingly uplifting for a poet who was known for doubling down on the angst. This collection reminds the reader that Sexton was capable of great joy, as well as a voluptuous female desolation. It doesn’t even matter that these poems aren’t written to her husband, but her lover.
Former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize nominee Robert Pinsky has been publishing collections fairly steadily for about forty years, including Samurai Song, Gulf Music: Poems, and History of My Heart. Lately, he’s been contributing fascinating and much anticipated essays on poetry — as well as his own poems — to Slate magazine. His work is lucid, intimate and completely delightful in a rough hewn way. He was even on The Simpsons. Truly, Pinsky is a poet for all seasons.