THE POETRY READER

Classic poems, lesser-known gems, and spirited commentary grace this sparkling anthology.

Yakich, a poet and English professor at Loyola University New Orleans, has gathered an eclectic roster of poems accompanied by his trenchant notes on the craft of writing and reading them. The collection includes works by Sappho, Shakespeare, and Keats; modern masterpieces like T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” and Wilfred Owens’ agonizing antiwar poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”; and larger selections from the editor’s favorites, Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa. The anthology especially shines in its more contemporary poems, from Jane Kenyon’s limpid “Happiness” (“It comes to the woman sweeping the street / with a birch broom, to the child / whose mother has passed out from drink”) to Vijay Seshadri’s “Memoir” of life’s shame-faced moments (“Your poor eyes / to see me weeping in my room / or boring the tall blonde to death. / Once I accused the innocent. / Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty. / I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow”). Readers put off by baffling poems with cryptic allusions and murky intent will find a sensibility here that tends toward blessed clarity—many pieces are prose poems—in which vibrant images and metaphors express intelligible thoughts on recognizable subjects. Yakich’s accompanying essays range freely across the poetic enterprise, addressing topics from the niceties of rhythm and line to the ubiquity of roses in poems to the writer’s eternal struggle with procrastination. Some are straightforward exercises in appreciation and analysis: “Begin by noting the images—that is, the concrete nouns. Write them, one at a time, in the margin alongside the poem…Where do you find connections, similarities, oppositions?” If you write, read, love, or even struggle with poetry, this is the anthology for you.

A superb collection of great poems, paired with keen insights on what makes them tick.