April 2009
National Poetry Month
If you have any other titles that you’d like to see added to this list, please leave a comment!
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New Collected Poems 
by Eavan Boland
PR 6052 .O35 A6 2008
“*Starred Review* If Yeats and Sylvia Plath had a love child, she would be Eavan Boland. Often hailed as a foremost contemporary Irish poet, she is a major world poet, as this rich collection of more than 40 years’ work attests…“
–Patricia Monaghan, for Booklist
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Sixty Poems 
by Charles Simic
PS 3569 .I4725 A6 2007
“The range of Charles Simic’s imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor.”
-James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress
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Selected Poems of Anne Sexton 
edited with an introduction by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George
PS 3537.E915 A6 1988
“Sexton claimed that poetry kept her alive through periods of suicidal self-hatred, and indeed her poetry started as therapy, a means suggested by her psychiatrist of documenting the unspeakable. This volume contains selections, many of them familiar, from her eight books. Despite professional success, she continued to suffer, but her work does more than document the pain that finally led to alcohol addiction and suicide. Labeled confessional, she preferred to be called a storyteller, often adopting a persona: ‘Like Oedipus I am losing my sight./Like Judas I have done my wrong.’ Much of the early poetry was workshop-influenced, but Sexton’s music as well as her intensity and good ear ultimately come through.”
-Library Journal, Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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The Best American Poetry 2008 
edited by Charles Wright
PS 584 .B43 2008
“Pulitzer Prize winner Wright is on the hook as guest editor for the latest edition of this essential annual, and he asks, basically, what and who makes a “Best American Poet”? The poets he selected represent quality and diversity…“
–Mark Eleveld, for Booklist
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Selected Poems
by Mark Strand
PS 3569.T69 A17 1980
“In this compilation of older and newer poems, Strand demonstrates his mastery of cadence and narrative style.”
-Product Description
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The Poem That Changed America : “Howl” Fifty Years Later 
edited by Jason Shinder
PS 3513.I74 H6356 2006
“If the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” aren’t seared into your brain, they will be by the end of this collection of 26 essays compiled by Shinder, a poet (Among Women) who learned much of his craft as Ginsberg’s pupil… Though everybody gives the poem its due as an American classic, personal reactions dominate, and nearly everyone has a Ginsberg story to tell, even if it’s just about being blown away by hearing him read. For those who have been moved by Ginsberg’s words, this collection serves as a stirring confirmation.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.”
-Publisher’s Weekly
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Howl:
Original draft facsimile, transcript & variant versions, fully annotated by author, with contemporaneous correspondence, account of first public reading, legal skirmishes, precursor texts & bibliography 
by Allen Ginsberg
PS 3513 .I74 H6 1986
“Published in 1956 as the title poem of Allen Ginsberg’s first collection, “Howl” is a prophetic masterpiece that overcame censorship trails to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. The annotated Howl is the poet’s own re-creation of the long process of composition of a revolutionary poem that broke new ground in America poetry through its expansive poetic form, tonal range, and freshness of spirit.”
-Product Description
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The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry 
edited and with an introduction by J.D. McClatchy
PS 615 .V46 2003
“Poetry devotees will be familiar with much of the work in this fine collection, which focuses on the period from WW II until the present. Sixty-five poets, including such well-known writers as Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, James Dickey, Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder, are represented by anywhere from one to a dozen poems each, as well as a brief biography that touches on the writer’s aesthetic ideas. McClatchy, himself a poet and critic, has done an exceptional job of selecting works that typify the poets’ styles and beliefs…“
-Publisher’s Weekly
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Duende: Poems 
by Tracy K. Smith
PS 3569.M539 D8 2007
“Starred Review. Federico García Lorca famously described duende in relation to flamenco music, but understood it as the dark wellspring for any artistic endeavor. As interpreted by Smith in her Laughlin Award–winning second collection, duende is the unforgiving place where the soul confronts emotion, acknowledges death and finds poetry… Although the site of undoing may well be the source of duende, the poet’s lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter under the considerable weight of her subject matter. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. “
-by Publisher’s Weekly
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New and Collected Poems, 1970-1985 
by David Ignatow
PS 3517 .G53 N49
“Ignatow’s ironic, spiky voicereassuring and doubting at onceis an abiding presence in American poetry, and this 360-page collection samples his strongest work. His forte is the short, quirky, conversational, free-verse lyric which juxtaposes personal problems and political realities (“It is heartrending to know a kiss/ cannot cure the world of its illness”). Prose poems explore a nightmare world between dream and reality, where Idi Amin’s massacres seem like everyday occurrences; the prose poem is also a vehicle to tackle larger questions (“Why did they think it was necessary for me to be born?”). Like Whitman, Ignatow is one with the lonely bird alighting on a branch, the dog choking in its own grief. The gulf that separates each of us from our true selves, the failure of the carnal as a route to the spiritual are themes explored with wry humor in a voice purified by experience. Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.”
-by Publisher’s Weekly
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Collected Poems 
by James Merrill
PS 3525.E6645 A17 2001
“Lauded at his death as a major American writer, a great poet of sociability and comedy, an important part of the gay literary tradition and a master of traditional forms, Merrill (1926-1995) is well-served by this monumental gathering off his shorter poems, carefully edited and likely to garner major attention and sales… Merrill’s sonnets, sapphics, longer sequences and sinuous sentences encompass lyric pathos, ebullient comedy, rapt romance and acrid satire. Their formal sophistication can belie their depth of feeling, which is exactly what some readers love best about Merrill’s work. New readers ought to skip the often-dry earliest books, begin with Merrill’s 1960s works and read forward. Confirmed fans will no doubt flip to the end of the book, where they will encounter many poems for the first time–most are short and witty, many of them are fine. The poems from Merrill’s last year can be arresting, including a self-elegy in which the dying poet thinks of himself as a Christmas tree…Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.”
-by Publisher’s Weekly
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The Dream of the Unified Feld : Selected Poems, 1974-1994
by Jorie Graham
PS 3557.R214 D73 1995
“Graham’s complex, faceted poems glint powerfully with compressed energy and suggest another meaning for the term atmospheric pressure. Her rendering of experience yields a dense, layered vision in which simplicity is rarely found and conclusions are likely to be double-edged… Themes and imagery recur: birds, angels, wings, madness; hands at work, passions political and personal. Graham’s keen interest in paintings yields a continual shifting of the thin border between art and life… Too compact for a single reading, this selection from previous collections provides several “self portraits” that help give her thought grounding. This volume is perfectly orchestrated, each poem extending the poem before it. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. “
-by Publisher’s Weekly
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The Dark Villages of Childhood 
by Stephen Frech
PS 3556.R3655 D37 2009
“Midwest Writing Center is pleased to announce that Stephen Frech’s collection, The Dark Villages of Childhood, has been selected by our panel of judges as the winning manuscript in our first annual chapbook contest. Dr. Frech is Associate Professor of English at Millikin University in Decatur, IL. Stephen Frech’s great strength in The Dark Villages of Childhood is not the elegant metaphor, though he has some of these, but the uncanny selection of mundane details that startle by their rightness.”
-Product Description
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Fire to Fire : New and Selected Poems
by Mark Doty
PS 3554 .O798 F57 2008
“The word that keeps leaping to mind, as you read through this gratifyingly thick collection of poems, is fluent. Doty’s facility with his chosen form—usually unrhymed stanzas of two, three, and four lines each, the meter floating between three beats and four—is so natural that the craft in his work is all but invisible; he makes the damnably difficult look deceptively simple. This impression of ease may also have something to do with the sense that Doty has found some breathing room, in his work and his private life…“
-by Kevin Nance, Booklist
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Salvation Blues : One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005
by Rodney Jones
PS 3560 .O5263 S25 2007
“Jones, who grew up in rural Alabama, and whose mother and grandparents (the poems tell us) were farm workers, pursues gritty anecdotes that place him within a Southern narrative tradition from Robert Penn Warren to Yusef Komunyakaa and Dave Smith. …As much as he chronicles hard lives, Jones (who teaches at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale) shows an unusual intellectual reach and a large verbal ambition. While this ample book will serve many readers as an introduction to Jones’s work, it also contains surprises for his fans: 24 new poems (some his best yet) build on his descriptive strengths as they incorporate political commentary, remembering high school, conceiving the end of the human species or excoriating politicians who sing the “Low-Down Sorry Right-Wing Blues.” Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved”
-by Publisher’s Weekly
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Rose : Poems 
by Li-Young Lee
PS 3562.E35438 R6 1986
“In this outstanding first book of poems, Lee is unafraid to show emotion, especially when writing about his father or his wife. ‘But there is wisdom/ in the hour in which a boy/ sits in his room listening,’ says the first poem, and Lee’s silent willingness to step outside himself imbues Rose with a rare sensitivity. The images Lee findssuch as the rose and the appleare repeated throughout the book, crossing over from his father’s China to his own America. Every word becomes transformative, as even his father’s blindness and death can become beautiful. There is a strong enough technique here to make these poems of interest to an academic audience and enough originality to stun readers who demand alternative style and subject matter. Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, “Soho Weekly News,” New York Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.”
-by Library Journal
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Donkey Gospel : Poems 
by Tony Hoagland
PS 3558 .O3355 D66 1998
“Hoagland’s second book (after Sweet Ruin, Univ. of Wisconsin, 1992) is nothing if not imaginative. Invigorated by “fine distress,” these graceful, perceptive poems gaze without blinking at what we hide from each other and ourselves when “head and heart/ are in different time zones.” Concerned by broken bonds of love and “climaxes of suffering” in a “dying, burning world,” he’s also angry, at times startlingly, at “dividedness” of identity, which makes it impossible to remain connected in a “hated prison” of selfhood. With refreshing candor (one poem defends D.H. Lawrence, “who opened up the world”), Hoagland reveals what happens when giving and “tenderness” are blocked by a “mass of delusions” and “strange appetites.” Acceptance of “joy and suffering made one at last” transforms what appear to be extravagant elegies into genuine empathy for “all our yearnings, all our fears.” This award-winning collection illuminates conflicts between individual desire for self-actualization and the “dark and soaring fact” of experience. To be alive, for Hoagland, “hurts exquisitely.”
-by Library Journal, A. Frank Allen
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Wild Gratitude : Poems 
by Edward Hirsch
PS 3558 .I64 W5 2003
“In Wild Gratitude, Edward Hirsch unfurls a kaleidoscope of inventive poems that honor other artists and writers, confront urban life and embrace East European fugitives, as well as eulogizing his grandparents and recollecting his youth. At their very best the poems in this collection, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, somehow merge these subjects, as is the case in “Three Journeys,” which draws parallels between a bag lady’s troubles and those of an artist. In all, the book offers readers a sweeping accumulation of work by a talented poet deserving of greater attention.”
-by Amazon.com
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For the Sleepwalkers : Poems 
by Edward Hirsch
PS 3558 .I64 F67 1998
“His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University.”
-by Poets.org
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The Way It Is : New & Selected Poems 
by William Stafford
PS 3537 .T143 W37 1999
“In a career that began at 46, Stafford (1914-1993) published 67 full-length collections and chapbooks of sharply observed verse, harvesting poems from his diligently carried out “Daily Writings.” Rather than completely refining out the rougher work, this second attempt at selecting from Stafford’s vast oeuvre quadruples the poem count of its predecessor, following the arc of a journeyman’s career with its attendant excesses, successes and failures. Stafford, who after some itinerant years settled into a 30 year stay at Oregon’s Lewis & Clark college and a stint as the state’s poet laureate, rendered the objects that came his way in ordinary language. Most striking, in hindsight, is the easy range of his intentionally limited set of linguistic pipes… Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. “
-by Publisher’s Weeky
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The Lincoln Poems 
by Dan Guillory
PS 3557 .U3 G85 L56A 2008
“Dan Guillory has focused on events in Lincoln’s life to create poetry that is sometimes lyrical and sometimes graphic, but always, always, written to present a Lincoln made of skin and bone and heart. Dan Guillory was born in New Orleans, educated in Baton Rouge, taveled to Africa, and became a professor in the midwest [here at Millikin]. His curiosity has led him to consider the life of Lincoln and the rich history of central Illinois. This is his second volume of poems to add to the numerous nonfiction titles he has in the marketplace.”
-Product Description from Amazon.com
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Collected Poems 1947-1980 
by Allen Ginsberg
PS 3513 .I74 A17
“Both an American publishing landmark and an immediate classic of international importance.”
-by CHOICE
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Perched on Nothing’s Branch : Selected Poetry of Attila József 
translated by Peter Hargitai; introduction by Maxine Kumin.
PH 3281 .J64 A6 1999
“This volume presents 40 poems and one essay by Jozsef (1905-1937), the left-wing schizophrenic Hungarian poet who committed suicide by throwing himself under a train. Shuttling between Paris, Vienna, and Budapest, this archetypal outcast was driven by unruly creative energy to express his alienation in surreal imagery: “I’m only a colored rattle, you hear me? My face/ is transparent/ behind it flowers soar, popped from electronic waves.” Nine stark woodcuts accentuate Jozsef’s painful attempts to establish human relationships able to endure selfconsciousness. These examples of his work only hint at the keen intellect tortured into sublimity by mental illness. Frank Allen, Assoc. Dean, Continuing Education, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.”
-by Library Journal
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Campos de Castilla = The Landscape of Castile 
by Antonio Machado; translated by Mary G. Berg & Dennis Maloney
PQ 6623 .A3 C313 2005
“This bilingual edition of the book central to Machado’s work, Campos de Castilla, reflects Machado’s life after he moved to the small town of Soria. Written between 1907 and 1917, the poems address his marriage and the death of his young wife from tuberculosis. Many of the poems were written in response to long walks he took in the countryside, and they capture the essence of the landscape and the people of Castile. Other poems address the postcolonial reality of Spain and give tribute to the writers, thinkers and poets of his country”
-Product Description
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The Winged Energy of Delight : Selected Translations 
by Robert Bly
PN 6101 .W44 2004
“Bly, always forceful and clarifying, recalls the astonishment and gratitude he felt when he first read the work of contemporary European and South American poets in the 1950s. He soon set himself the task of translating the poets who spoke most resonantly to his soul, thus discovering the immense joys and challenges of the art of translation. Over the years, Bly extended his inspired efforts to include Horace, poets of India and Persia, Neruda, Lorca, Rilke, and beyond, and he now gathers together selected translations of poets remarkable for their exaltation and outrage, spirituality and rebelliousness, lyricism and compassion. Bly introduces the poets with incandescent interpretations of their work and summaries of their lives, heightening the enjoyment of the poems that follow…The result is an exceptionally spirited international collection of artful and passionate translations. Donna Seaman,Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “
-by Booklist
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Poems for the Millennium : the University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry- Vol. 1 
edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
PN 6101 .P492 vol. 1
“This invaluable collection, rather than gathering the most fully realized poetry of this century’s first four decades, maps poetic possibility, thus demonstrating how poetry was literally remade during this period. A section of “forerunners” traces the revolutionizing of poetic intuition from Blake to Lautreamont. Italian and Russian Futurism’s typographical experiments, best seen through the “manifestos” are faithfully rendered; Dada and Surrealism are correctly treated as separate movements with differing aims. Aime Cesaire’s term Negritude defines a section of Black Francophone literature clearly influenced by Surrealism, but centered on its African and Caribbean beginnings. Three long “galleries,” collecting poems not necessarily related by nationality or subject matter, are interspersed among the sections of explicit poetic movements. Commentaries, many on individual poets- C.P. Cavafy, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Osip Mandelstam and Pablo Neruda among them- and often in the poets’ own words, give context to the unwieldy mass of these poems, many difficult to find in English. The next volume promises to show the use to which today’s poets have put this rich legacy. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. “
-by Publisher’s Weekly
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Poems for the Millennium : the University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry- Vol. 2 
edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris
PN 6101 .P492 vol. 2
“This collection includes poetry from post-World War II through the Cold War and its aftermath. The poets are well known and there is a wide representation of voices. Individual poets and movements are featured: Pablo Neruda, John Cage, the Tammuzi poets, postwar Japanese poetry, “Language” poets, “Concrete” poets, “Beat” poets, Maggie O’Sullivan, James Joyce, and many others. Unlike many anthologies that highlight only a few poets with a certain perspective, this is an objective anthology of the best of this period. A must-purchase for any collection. Linda A. Vretos, West Springfield High School, Springfield, VA; Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc”
-by Library School Journal
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The Collected Poems / Sylvia Plath 
edited by Ted Hughes
PS 3566 .L27 A17 1992
“Sylvia Plath died in 1963, and even now her outsize persona threatens to bury her poetry–the numerous biographies and studies often drawing the reader toward anecdote and away from the work. It’s a relief to turn to the poems themselves and once more be jolted by their strange beauty, hard-wrought originality, and acetylene anger. “It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk in, / O golden child the world will kill and eat.” While the juvenilia and poems written before 1960 that Ted Hughes has included here prefigure Plath’s later obsessions, they also enable us to witness her turn from thesaurus-heavy verse to stripped-down art as they gather power through raw simplicity. “The blood jet is poetry. / There is no stopping it,” she declares in “Kindness.”
-by Amazon.com
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