It’s been the sort of year in which it often seems, as W. B. Yeats famously put it, that the center cannot hold. The kind of year in which things fly apart. The kind of year in which the best lack all conviction, while the worst wind up on the New York Times best-seller list because the Republican National Committee has bought huge quantities of their booklike object.
In these times, it’s natural to seek solace in sophisticated contemporary art that grapples with the concepts of apocalypse and redemption — work in which, for instance, a young queen and her brave sister journey to rectify a terrible historical wrong, taking with them only a sturdy commoner, an anthropomorphized reindeer and a magical snowman who seems to have ingested huge quantities of whatever drugs appeal to magical snowmen.
If you don’t have seats for “Frozen 2,” though, you might consider turning to contemporary poetry, which has been doing its best to come up with fresh metaphors in a world in which the falcon cannot hear the falconer because the falcon is somewhere in Ukraine. Below are 10 collections to consider that are full of passionate intensity, mostly of the good sort. In keeping with Times policy, this list contains no relatives, close friends, students, colleagues and so forth. I’ve also generally favored books that seem worthy of more attention than they’ve received thus far, as well as authors I haven’t previously covered.
THE NEXT LOVES, by Stéphane Bouquet. Translated by Lindsay Turner. (Nightboat, paper, $16.95.) This collection of rueful, frank, breezily wanton love poems by a notable contemporary French poet has almost none of the hiccups and irregularities one expects from a translated work. (The original French isn’t provided, so it’s unclear what liberties Turner is taking, but whatever they are, she should keep taking them.) Bouquet is heavily influenced by the New York School poets, and he appears to have updated their considerable virtues; the conversational immediacy of the lines is tempered by a wry soulfulness, as in: “If I weren’t so tired I could invent for us / an electric lavender for automatic honey, greenhouses for butterflies, thickets / teeming with caterpillars, a burgeoning anonymous happiness. But I don’t even know / what time I went to bed last night.”
NIGHTSHADE, by Andrea Cohen. (Four Way, paper, $15.95.) Cohen writes aphoristic, unfashionable poems that are endlessly and easily quotable (one of the reasons they’re unfashionable, which is not to fashion’s credit). Here’s “Declarative”:
I give you
broken
things, so
you won’t
ask: Will
this break?
And here’s “Smoke Signals”:
All of the
above
but not
for long.
It’s become at best a term of faint praise to say that a particular writer is accessible (it also makes the writer sound like an emergency exit), so instead let’s say that this is acutely literary writing that wears its literariness lightly enough for long journeys to unfamiliar places.
DAYS & DAYS: Poems, by Michael Dickman. (Knopf, $27.) Poetry often works the way conversations work, which is to say it’s as much gestural as declarative. Dickman understands this intimately; “Days & Days” is a patient meditation on parenthood, childhood, yardwork, parking passes, hotels and the suburbs (among many other things) that moves in gentle if often unexpected shifts, like a raised hand signaling a detour in an observation about the neighbors. From “Wildstyle”:
Aerosol flower in the middle of the air
makes one perfect
what
butterfly / buttercup
their open faces
the color of yellow street signs
Most flowers I love more than people
but who cares
about people?
The book closes with an 80-page poem called “Lakes Rivers Streams,” and while the prospect of an 80-page poem is generally about as enticing as that of an 80-pound cabbage, the actual poem in question is a funny, confidently tender ode to dailiness that more than justifies its length. There are 10 books on this list, but if there were only three, this would be one of them.
MOSSES AND LICHENS: Poems, by Devin Johnston. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Johnston’s seventh book, like his previous collections, is quiet, emotionally reserved and a marvel of technical prowess. These three qualities are currently almost as scarce in the American poetry world as Peloton bikes, so surely Johnston must be doing something wrong. Right? In any case, Johnston’s poetry is admirable as much for its classical poise as for the tremors that both undermine and bolster that poise. Consider “At Forty-Six,” which works its way through the usual scene of adults loitering together outside, “a few acquaintances / talking seldom / and then always / in dry tones / of scuffed gravel / horseradish in vinegar,” in order to conclude:
appetite
without fulfillment
no more outrageous hopes
one mountain pale
beyond another.
ALL THAT BEAUTY, by Fred Moten. (Letter Machine Editions, paper, $16.) Moten is an old-school avant-gardist — a description that’s probably not so much an oxymoron these days as an inevitable convergence — so as one might expect, “All That Beauty” includes a whirl of shapes and forms, frequent and conspicuous disjunction, and chunks of prose marinated in theory. But Moten is also a thoroughly capable poet in the traditional sense (see the excellent “fifty little springs”), and this is a wily, often funny, sometimes abrading examination of race, art and the admixture of race and art (“Does art move / against our / terrible capacity / to settle? Or does / it settle where / we move?”). This book will be an undertaking for many readers, but it’s well worth it.
NOUNS & VERBS: New and Selected Poems, by Campbell McGrath. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $31.) Some poets feel as if they’re unmoving natural features, like mountain ranges or lakes, and their authority derives at least in part from that sense of stillness. McGrath has a more restless talent, and it suits him. This selection is wide-ranging in the best sense of that description, as McGrath moves easily from sprawling poems like the 21-page “Commodity Fetishism in the White City” to small monuments to precision like “Releasing the Sherpas,” which is as neat a restatement of the mind-body problem as you’ll read. There are quite a few poems about poetry here, but McGrath’s literariness is leavened by an appealing populism — this is a book that happily namechecks Wal-Mart and Taco Bell, although it should be noted that McGrath is wrong to imply, in “Guns N’ Roses,” that the key track on “Appetite for Destruction” is “Sweet Child O’Mine.” The correct answer, despite its overuse at sporting events, is “Welcome to the Jungle.”
TO THE WREN: Collected & New Poems 1991-2019, by Jane Mead. (Alice James, paper, $29.95.) Mead, who died in September, wrote clean, spare, often elegiac lines that frequently drew upon her experience on her family farm in Northern California. There is little pastoral softness here, though; Mead clearly loves the land, but when she thinks about birds, she thinks about the cowbird, who “lays her eggs / in the nests of other birds,” and the blue jay, which “simply eats the eggs.” Or as she puts it in “Been a Grapevine in My Stead”:
In the end you are
and then after some time
you are not, more or less —
as the saying goes. What
did you want? You
who were barely honored
with birth in the first
place, who nearly missed
being in this world, you
when where could have been
a grapevine in your stead?
A PIECE OF GOOD NEWS, by Katie Peterson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Peterson’s prickly, playful book is filled with quasi parables (including a poem called “New Parable”) that often keep an attractive distance from their own sponsoring emotions — attractive in part because when Peterson chooses to narrow that gap, the results are striking. So we pass from “The Fountain,” a knottily delightful examination of what it means to make something — a statue of a woman by a fountain, a poem, a relationship with an audience — to “The Massachusetts Book of the Dead,” a series of short poems focused on the death of Peterson’s mother that includes these almost brutally straightforward lines:
My mother died at nine o’clock at night.
I will be awake
past my bedtime forever.
It’s as if a fable split open and a diary page fell out. Poetry is always about what’s being said and not said, but rarely are the two so expertly intertwined.
NO MATTER, by Jana Prikryl. (Tim Duggan Books, paper, $15.) Prikryl is a shrewd and delicately severe writer with a remarkable gift for observation — “Salon” is the definitive take on the sociology of getting your nails done, and the poems titled “Anonymous” are dry, precise sketches of old photographic portraits in which the tone is so even you could build a tower of dominoes on it. As in:
Dandelions on the lawn are playing
sundials, their globes give out the time
of year. She’s not smiling so much
as grimacing against the pull of the brush
and squinting against the sun. Nowhere are
her feet more than tacit. She is the tallest one.
Notice the rhyme of “sun” and “one” in the last two lines, as well as the exactness of “more than tacit” (as opposed to, say, “biddable” or “cooperative”). This is the subtle care this writer brings to every poem here.
FIELDNOTES ON ORDINARY LOVE, by Keith S. Wilson. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) A strong debut collection in which the romanticism you expect (and want) from a younger writer is held in check by a considerable, self-questioning intelligence. As Wilson puts it in “Light as Imagined Through a Body of Ice,” in which relationships and art are conjoined as ways of looking:
You go to museums to fall in love
with the most impassioned strokes, to share the genuflections
of love. And then you go home to what works every day,
catch your glint of everything off the edge of the fork.
To appreciate how well done this is, just substitute “knife” — a much less homely word — for “fork.” Wilson is just beginning his career, so he has plenty of time to wander in museums still. But it’s good to see he already realizes the fork is what will feed him.
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