“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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,...
“It Isn’t Me” is an amazing poem from an ever-more astounding oeuvre. As quietly shattering as Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” as unaccountably and irresistibly doomed as Weldon Kees’s “Robinson,” its human subject is a creature part scapegoat, part Rilke’s unicorn (Sonnets to Orpheus,...
I’m choosing it because the Golem is a generally fascinating myth, but Borges’s recurring thematic obsession with dreaming things into reality elevates it to a new level. —Bobby Wicks The Golem If, as the Greek maintains in the Cratylus, a name is the archetype of a thing, the...
I was really struck by it when I heard Seamus Heaney read it on NPR a few years ago. It’s a beautiful, touching, gently mind-bending vision from childhood. The last sentence (which is I guess almost half the poem) is just so lovely—as an...
While you may know your spirit animal, we suspect your poet animal might not be so obvious. To help you navigate this year’s Poetry Month, the team at Work in Progress has created another Highly Scientific Quiz with drawings from Timothy Taranto that matches your lyrical leanings with a character from a poem by one of FSG’s most beloved poets. Read all of our Poetry Month coverage here
I chose it because in reading these lines, they become as much birds in song as birds in song are birds in song. —Elisabeth McAvoy Spring Dawn In spring sleep, dawn arrives unnoticed. Suddenly, all around, I hear birds in song. A loud night. Wind and rain came,...
When I read Derek Walcott it happens every third line or so. I wince with envy, pure and simple. Not the way Salieri was jealous of Mozart, more the way the bloke in the suit sits beside his date in the dark cinema, watching...
Only John Berryman could see life with both such unbearable dread and such earnestly childlike wonder, and only he could capture those contradictory feelings in such a poignant and devastating nursery rhyme about something as elementary as the alphabet. —Steven Pfau Mr. Pou & the...
Named after the great work by Persian poet, astronomer, philosopher and Omar Khayyam, Lawrence Joseph's “Rubaiyat” is nothing less than a contemporary cosmology for the Forever War. Where are the heavens when satellites clog them, looking for bomb targets? What is order, when the...
Tomas Tranströmer, who passed away on March 26th at age eighty-three, remains mostly unknown in America even though he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011 and English translations of his poems are both accessible and accurate. This translation from The Deleted...
This is a poem from Eugenio Montale’s Collected Poems, a book that never leaves my bedside table that I think has been perfectly translated. I can’t imagine life without them. —Stuart Dybek In the Greenhouse The lemon-house was being over- ridden by the moles’ stampedes. The scythe shone...
This poem is a great reminder of how precious life is. As Neruda writes, “joy in all things, in what falls and what flourishes.” Enjoy life, appreciate its beauty, and know that it takes just one moment for everything to change. —Vicki Genna How much happens...