For nearly thirty years I have been thinking about the little innocuous dog in “Five Flights Up.” This poem, though not Bishop’s most famous or quoted, has a quietness I love. I live now in Madrid, on the fourth floor, and beneath me, oddly,...

Like the last stanza of Edmund Waller’s “Go, lovely Rose,” this poem gets to the heart of things with such speed and economy. —Janet Malcolm Brennende Liebe     —1904 Dearest love: The roses are in bloom again, cream and rose, to either side of the brick walk. I pass among...

Even now, the voice that announces itself in the opening line of “Herbert White,” the first poem in Frank Bidart’s first collection, Golden State—“When I hit her on the head, it was good”—shocks and unnerves me, its force undulled by fifteen years of rereading....

Larkin’s chillingly lucid poem on the contemplation of death can wither the resolve of even the most resolute stoics: “Death is no different whined at than withstood.” —Will Wolfslau Aubade I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless...

I cherish Poeta en Nueva York, and back in college I translated this poem for an introductory poetry class. My translation was abysmal—Greg Simon and Steven F. White show how it’s done. —Laird Gallagher Ruin To Regino Sáinz de la Maza Never finding itself, traveling through its...

The opening poem of C. K. Williams’s The Singing, "The Doe" gives me everything I want from a first page: a welcoming brevity, indelible details (a "pivoting ear"), and a foreboding quiet charged with “incipient alarm.” As he does throughout the collection, Williams...

It’s astonishing how a poem can sound just like an exhalation. I’ve never been able to read Carl Phillips without an audible sigh of relief. —Jo Stewart Late in the Long Apprenticeship At last, he’s asleep. I can look at him the way I’m meant to. His body moves...

Nothing like a bare tree “lit and fraught with snow” to transcend “sorrow’s flower.” Wiman’s poetry overflows with these sorts of subtle, careful observations of pain and grace—it is endlessly humbling. —John Knight After a Storm My sorrow’s flower was so small a joy It took a...

“When I was beautiful” is a line from Mahmoud Darwish; Averill Curdy elopes with it. No, really: “Wedding guests / feasting like wasps / on soft-skinned fruits and sweetened wines, / even as a noise / more appallingly intimate / than thunder shocks some...

I’ve always liked this poem, and as I’m turning forty this month, lately I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot. Born in Leningrad, as it was then known, Joseph Brodsky had a hard life, in part because of his poetry; he was sentenced...

The poet Ali Ahmed Said, better known by his pen name, Adonis, was born in a mountain village of a few hundred people in Northwestern Syria in 1930. His father was a farmer, and his mother, who died in 2013 at the age of...

Pablo Neruda found me in a strange way. I was still a teenager, obsessed with the Beats and pouring over Whitman in English class. I enjoyed writing poetry, but did not yet take it seriously. I was standing in the poetry section of the...

Of all the poets I’ve been reading lately, no one’s work sticks so tenaciously to my craw as that of Carol Ann Duffy. Or was that in my craw? Sound gets lip-service but needs prophets; her poems are liturgy to that end. Image and...

I came across Neruda’s poem long before I had any cause to know the suffering of lost love or the secrets a night can hold. And yet it spoke to me, made me feel tenderness, perhaps because longing actually precedes loss. As a grown...

When I was a kid, my family used to go on summer vacations to Jamaica. The only things left from those trips are sensory memories, but when I read this poem, I imagine myself sitting with my parents and brother at another table at...

This poem fills my mouth with everything I crave—beauty, bread, and stillness. —Nora Barlow I eat this silence like bread. The white lake replaces my head I am cold & calm as the untracked snows.         Maureen N. McLane is the author of three collections...

When I first saw James Fenton read onstage, I found myself, midway through this poem, staring at his head with my jaw set and my mouth moronically ajar. I didn’t have a mirror, but if I try to imagine my face, I think of...

In this poem, from Federico Garcia Lorca’s wonderful, evocative book, Poet in New York, the shifting connotations of words—horse, dog, swallow, bee—lead us through the stages of artistic creation, from painful physical desire to the bittersweet perception of beauty (the rose), to the...

From the impressive FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, it would have been easy to choose one of Jorge Luis Borges’s masterpieces without making a mistake. Particularly the one titled “Borges and I,” which interestingly has always been read either as a...

I often rely on my friend Max Freeman—a filmmaker, photographer, and exceptionally fine poet himself—to steer me toward poems and poets worth savoring. Last time we met, he pressed me to read Patrizia Cavalli and to start with her “effortless masterpiece” Pigre divinità e...