Poems help us celebrate. Poems help us heal. Poems can be shared. Poems can be private. Happy Poetry Month! Here are some new anthologies and collections to help you celebrate:
How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope by James Crews, with a Forward by Ross Gay
This beautifully curated selection of more than 100 uplifting poems of gratitude, invites gratefulness into daily life and includes opportunities for reflection and writing, topics for discussion, and reading group questions.
More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.
100 Poems to Break Your Heart by Edward Hirsch
100 of the most moving and inspiring poems of the last 200 years from around the world, a collection that will comfort anyone trapped by grief or loneliness, selected by the award-winning, best-selling, and beloved author of How to Read a Poem. Hirsch includes poems from the nineteenth century to the present, and explains them, helping the reader fully experience the range of emotion and wisdom within each poem.
Implicit in poetry is the idea that we are enriched by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering—not just our own suffering but also the pain of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a record. And poets are people who are determined to leave a trace in words, to transform depths of feeling into art that speaks to others.
Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. This anthology follows on the heels of her comprehensive anthology published last year: When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through.
Her signature laureate project gathered the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project—including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others—to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations.
Kindest Regards: Poems, Selected and New by Ted Kooser
Four decades of poetry―and a generous selection of new work―make up this extraordinary collection by Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser. Firmly rooted in the landscapes of the Midwest, Kooser’s poetry succeeds in finding the emotional resonances within the ordinary. Kooser’s language of quiet intensity trains itself on the intricacies of human relationships, as well as the animals and objects that make up our days. As Poetry magazine said of his work, “Kooser documents the dignities, habits, and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance.”
Kim Stafford divides his collection into five parts: In Spite of War, Pandemic Poems, Revising Genesis, The Cup No One Can See, And All My Love. As the former poet laureate of Oregon, Stafford shared poems from this book in libraries, prisons, on reservations, with veterans, immigrants, homeless families, legislators, and students in schools. He writes for hidden heroes, resonant places, and for our chance to converge in spite of differences. For the early months of the pandemic, Stafford wrote and posted a poem for challenge and comfort each day on Instagram and published a series of chapbooks that traveled hand to hand to far places—to Norway, Egypt, and India. He views the writing and sharing of poetry as an essential act of testimony to sustain tikkun olam, the healing of the world.
In the afterward he talks about the notion shared by Elizabeth Wooley as he became Oregon poet Laureate: The more I do this, the less it’s about what the poem is, and the more it’s about who the poems serves. He ends with this insight of his own: As several have said in various ways, prose tries to explain what can be said, while poetry seeks to convey what can’t be said. Poetry is a speaking silence, a musical nudge, a glance between intimate friends.
May this book be the hidden spring you seek.
Packed with silly rhymes and witty wordplay, A.F. Harrold's poetry is bursting with fun—and advice. The Note to Readers at the beginning says: It’s a dangerous world, and so I have created this book to keep readers everywhere safe. But it’s not always the most useful. . .
Never apologize to a door you’ve walked into, unless it’s a really special door.
Don’t serve a cat soup when the cat wants jelly. Tomato soup won’t fill a feline belly.
Don’t put a rock in a roll, unless you hate having teeth.
There are sections of advice relating to: food, ducks and dessert; animals, giants and the natural world; school life, onions and general-knowledge-type stuff; the human condition, dreams and miscellaneous other subjects that didn’t fit elsewhere. Each section ends with even further notes like this:
Expectations
I excepted a surprise for my birthday
Imagine my surprise when I didn’t get one
The Index of advice, examples, morals and useful lessons at the end is delightful. This is a great way to have fun with young readers, a way to share silly rhymes and a way to acknowledge the parts of a book. Among the seemingly nonsensical stanzas on onions, sausages, and kilted koalas are exercises in critical thinking—what advice should readers follow, and what should they dismiss? Both silly and poignant, this book is perfect for curious readers, poets, and cabbages everywhere.
Celebrate Poetry! Celebrate Spring!
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