[John Whitworth]

A student of mine gave me Symborska's Poems. I don't really know why he did, but the choice was inspired. A problem, of course, that I don't have the language. nevertheless, I can see she is a poet of genius. I used two of the poems for lessons in writing poetry, in the days when I did such things. I argued it was possible to see how the poems worked without knowing Polish, without even having access to the translation on the facing page. And it is! Though I say it myself, these were very good lessons.

[Michael F]

Janice, I had a thought that you might select Szymborska… I held off as long as I could!

Jim, I bought Non-Required Reading on your recommendation, I think, from this board months ago. You’re right: it’s a delight on every page.

John, I bet those were some lessons! And I bet there are some students who won’t forget them, or you.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Michael, I did indeed have her books in the stack when I was chosing and did a "seek" operation to see that she hadn't been nominated. And then it fell off my radar. I had a big stack, I'll tell you.

I have the Swedish edition of Non-Required Reading and agree it is delightful.

I underwent surgery the morning of the day she got the Nobel and the first thing I asked when I woke up in the ward was who the year's laureate was. "Some Polish woman i never heard of," was the answer. I knew who she was though, and I just smiled and went back to sleep.

[Bill Carpenter]

Quick post to gush over The Idle Demon. Thanks for the recommendation, Nigel! What polish and individuality! In some cases, an acute paradox between the playful, humorous foregrounding of exaggerated rhymes characteristic of "light" verse, with poignant and penetrating presentations of experience. (Reminds me of the excellent tribute to Light at West Chester last June.) Enjoying this book! Best, Bill

[Nigel Mace]

Bill - Delighted that Lister has found another admirer. When I met him in April he told me that in the late 40s and early 50s he was part of a weekly poetry writing group at whose meetings the presiding, and somewhat awe inspiring, lady who ran them would ring a bell and pass round a box of potential titles/subjects and, after these were distributed 'blind', fifteen minutes would be allowed for the composition of a poem. Quite a few of the best early poems in The Idle Demon came from these sessions and I think they flowed from him not least because, along with all of the skill/craft, he was, and I hope still is, really that richly warm, intelligent and humane man who speaks with so little sign of effort from his pages. The saw, "Trust the poem not the poet" has never been rendered so comprehensively redundant.
Best,
Nigel

[Tony Barnstone]

Susan,

I like The Gold Cell, lots of good poems in that one. To my taste, it's narrowly edged out by The Dead and the Living, because that's a wonderfully shaped book and it balances personal and public/historical poems marvelously, and there are no duds in the book. Maybe I'll use one of my last two to nominate it--or not! There are so many good ones....

Best, Tony

[John Whitworth]

I have 'The Idle Demon' too. A treasure!

[William A. Baurle]

I'm using my fifth and last to nominate one of my favorite poets, Derek Walcott. I stressed over which single volume to select, but decided I couldn't do that since I have only the collected. Of course I could choose Another Life, which was one single poem in a single book, included in the collected; or I could pick Star-Apple Kingdom, which includes my favorite Walcott poem, The Schooner Flight, but that would be dishonest since I haven't read all of that book's contents. I settled on the Collected Poems because it really is an amazing book, a comprehensive, opulent offering of Walcott's poems. I took it out of the library in NY when I was in my early twenties, and loved it so much I renewed it like five times. I finally bought it when I found it in a Barnes and Noble (or was it Amazon?) much later on.

I will offer one sample, a section of a longer poem, The Schooner Flight:



8. Fight with the Crew


It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark—
that was the cook, some Vincentian arse
with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark,
and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn’t give me a ease,
like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book,
this same one here, that I was using to write
my poetry, so one day this man snatch it
from my hand, and start throwing it left and right
to the rest of the crew, bawling out, “Catch it,”
and start mincing me like I was some hen
because of the poems. Some case is for fist,
some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife—
this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,
but he keep reading, “O my children, my wife,”
and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;
it move like a flying fish, the silver knife
that catch him right in the plump of his calf,
and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white
than he thought he was. I suppose among men
you need that sort of thing. It ain’t right
but that’s how it is. There wasn’t much pain,
just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,
but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.

- Derek Walcott (b. 1930 Saint Lucia, West Indies)

I saw and heard the great poet read this section on a TV documentary once, back in NY, and it made all the little follicles on my body stand up, especially when he said the last line. This is what poetry is all about, in my view. This kind of dialect poetry really works when you hear Walcott read it.

Edited in some links:

Complete The Schooner Flight poem:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177932

Walcott's Collected Poems 1948-1984:

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poem...ollected+poems

They give you a BIG sample of the book on Amazon's "look inside" feature.

[Edward Zuk]

The books so far (since I needed to go through the thread anyways and see if my next selection was taken):

1. James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break
2. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems
3. R. P. Lister, The Idle Demon
4. Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
5. Anne Sexton, Transformations
6. John Berryman, The Dream Songs
7. Robert Frost, New Hampshire
8. Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
9. Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
10. Tom Leonard, Intimate Voices
11. Robert Frost, Mountain Interval
12. George Starbuck, Desperate Measures
13. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
14. W. H. Auden, Another Time
15. William Barnstone, ed., Modern European Poetry
16. Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance
17. Richard Hugo, Making Certain It Goes On
18. Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
19. Robert Lowell, Life Studies
20. W. D. Snodgrass, Heart's Needle
21. Theodore Roethke, Open House
22. Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries
23. Edwin Muir, One Foot in Eden
24. Edgar Bowers, Collected Poems (1999)
25. Frank Stanford, Battlefield
26. Robert Fitzgerald, trans., The Odyssey
27. John Betjeman, Summoned By Bells
28. Richard Wilbur, The Beautiful Changes
29. e.e. cummings, selected poems, ed. by R.S. Kennedy
30: Eugenio Montale, Le Occasioni
31. Timothy Steele, Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems
32. Kim Addonizio, Tell Me
33. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence, and Other Poems
34. Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
35. Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Portraits and Elegies
36. Richmond Lattimore, trans., The Iliad
37. E. J. Pratt, Selected Poems
38. Edwin Arlington Robinson, Collected Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson
39. Cor van den Heuvel, ed., The Haiku Anthology
40. Kay Ryan, Elephant Rocks
41. H. Finlay, The Dancers Inherit the Party
42. Sylvia Plath, Ariel
43. Seamus Heaney, Station Island
44. Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems
45. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins now first published, ed. Robert Bridges
46. Kit Wright, Hoping it might be so
47. Wilfred Owens, Collected Poems
48. Derek Mahon, Selected Poems
49. [*Missing*]
50. Humbert Wolfe, The Uncelestial City
51. These are not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women
52. U. A. Fanthorpe, New and Collected Poems
53. Amy Clampitt, The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt
54. Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
55. Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell
56. Wislawa Szynborska, View With A Grain of Sand
57. Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984

[Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead]

No 58
May I suggest The Gods of Winter by Dana Gioia? (1991) It was chosen by the Poetry Book Society and I have loved it ever since I found it. The poem quoted here, “Planting a Sequoia” is just beautiful and stays with me both for its ideas and for the beauty of its lyrical harmonies.

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth–
An olive or a fig tree–a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can–our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

And from The Antipodes I also love
No 59 Les Murray (New Collected Poems) – rather general, not a specific volume.. Here’s
"Performance":

I starred that night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was busters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouéttes, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!

As usual after any triumph, I was
of course, inconsolable.


from
Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996, which is as good as any.