Over the past year, I’ve been reading Edward Hirsch’s The Heart of American Poetry. I haven’t been giving it a thorough, cover-to-cover reading, but rather the kind of random perusal that I find most enjoyable when I don’t have a particular reading goal in mind. In each chapter, Hirsch explores a poem that has altered his understanding of American poetry. I like that he doesn’t pretend to approach this list as a scholar might— The Heart doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive or definitive heart. In the introduction, Hirsch underscores the fact that he chose the featured poems somewhat randomly. He collected the essays during lockdown, and he didn’t have access to his full library. So he had to do some hard thinking about which poems have truly made the biggest impression on him over time by relying largely on his memory of reading said poems.
I thought that was a cool exercise, and that the table of contents said something about both the reader (Hirsch) and the poems/poets represented. Which poems stick around in your noggin’ indefinitely, and why?
I, too, have books of poems I’ve loved scattered throughout Tucson and beyond, given as presents or stored in Tennessee or left who knows where. So I thought this would be an interesting activity for myself: If I had to list ten poetry collections that come to my mind the quickest, what would they be? If I honestly asked myself: What poetry collections have rattled around in my brain the loudest over the years, how would I respond? The goal isn’t to simply recall poetry collections that I love,not to come up with a top ten. Rather, the list below = the ten most consistently present books in my mind.
I also tried not to include books written by close friends (I have so many unreasonably talented poets in my life), simply because any time you make a list it can feel injurious to anyone left off. There are some small exceptions— I am lucky to know Joan Kane, and my friend Todd Fredson translated Tanella Boni’s There Where It’s So Bright In Me. It’s safe for you to assume that Bojan’s Currents looms large in my mind and heart (doesn’t hurt that my husband’s book is the astounding book that it is, either). I don’t even feel the need to list it below, but I think it bears mentioning.
I’ve focused specifically on poetry collections because I’m trying to do some thinking about what makes a poetry book a book. What makes a collection memorable as a cohesive text? I’m going to try to think about that, using only recall memory.
A Short History of the Shadow — Charles Wright
I remember reading this book while preparing to move to Davidson, NC, for college. My father grew up in Kingsport Tennessee, and even just saying the title of Wright’s 1997 collection still conjures for me what I’ve always perceived to be the metaphysical eeriness of Sullivan County. Driving over the Blue Ridge Mountains, these poems were my guide and friend, asking me to look everywhere— and inside— more closely.
The Always Broken Plates of Mountains — Rose McLarney
This book found me in graduate school (thank you, Four Way Books), and I was immediately smitten by McLarney’s confident lyric narratives. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two Appalachian poets made this list, nor that they made this list first. We’re always looking for examples of poets that somehow stand as proof that we can be a poet too, aren’t we? I know that’s selfish, but it’s true. Both McLarney and Wright offered me important early insight on how to treat my home region with tenderness in my art, and also that tenderness itself can be piercing.
The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife — Joan Naviyuk Kane
This was a book I read from start to finish without interruption, which is the ideal way of reading a book of poems and something I always hope to do, but admittedly something I rarely end up accomplishing. I was living by myself for the first time, in a small apartment in Tempe, AZ, and I have a very tactile memory of the couch I was sitting on— it was beige and scratchy. Then, as if I’d been buckled into a Contact interstellar spaceship, I was ferried into the imagined and real and surreal landscapes of the arctic and subarctic. What I saw and heard there haunted me, and continues to do so.
Ignatz — Monica Youn
This is the first book I really wanted to teach when I began leading introductory creative writing classes, which is a little hilarious because it’s not a (quote unquote) easy book of poems. But man, this is a project book done so well, and it sparks my imagination just thinking about it. “As if my life were cut and fitted to a frame”— I can remember the Emily Dickinson epigraph, and I remember being so impressed by the creative way that Youn used her close readings of an early 20th-century comic strip, Krazy Kat, to explore the ineffable inner turmoil inflicted by romance and desire. I would now teach this or point to this book as proof that even the “simple” activity of reading a comic book can explode into a collection of profound and complex poems.
Quantum Lyrics — A. Van Jordan
Man, this book is GORGEOUS. The way Van Jordan uses concepts from particle physics and the history of science to untangle lived racism, the complex joy of music, and more, … wowza. Reading this book helped me reimagine just how vast the terrain of poetry can be. I was lucky enough to hear the poet on a panel at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars conference in Tempe. I was definitely fangirling.
Poems: North & South — A Cold Spring — Elizabeth Bishop
I think it’s notable that this is the first (post-, or late, or whatever… she’s on the line) modern poet I’ve included on the list. You can probably boil the reasons for this down to the fact that I read most other modern poets in anthologies like the MAP or via a poet’s collected works, and it’s hard for me to tease out, say, what Wallace Stevens poems were published when and where. Also, I guess I’ve just always loved Bishop’s poetry the most? The way her careful observations build to a surprising portrait of an intimate life, here— this book took my breath away. A good collection of poetry, like a good poem, should expand further on each re-reading.
What Are Years — Marianne Moore
I’m including this book mostly because I have a prized first edition of this book, so when I think of poetry collections, the black cover with the large white letters hovers in my mind. I also love the title poem, “What are Years.” Honestly, the other poems are hard to remember, largely because I first read them, as mentioned above, in collected works/anthologies.
A Nuclear Family — April Naoko Heck
This book meant so much to me as I was working out how to engage with my own nuclear heritage. I can thank Melissa Febos for scheduling a reading lineup that featured Heck in Brooklyn, and for bringing this book into my life. Heck is a genius at adding up small gestures and details into stirring portraits of a family’s life, of diving head first into the horrors of the atomic bombs, and narrating the deeply-felt tension of post-atomic USA, and more specifically, her Japanese-American family, whose income depended on the father’s work at a nuclear reactor.
Tongue of War — Tony Barnstone
I read this book in a seminar on translation, though the poems, mostly sonnets, weren’t originally written in another language— not exactly. Barnstone (whose “Sonnet Feature” I probably return to on a monthly basis, no joke) did a lot of primary research “from both sides of the Pacific theater of World War II,” and he then translated or transposed some voices from those primary documents into these flabbergasting, ventriloquizing lyrics. I think that my experience reading this book probably marks the beginning of my understanding that every poem written has been written in some sort of act of translation.
There Where It’s So Bright In Me — Tanella Boni, translated by Todd Fredson
This is the most recently read book on my list and still it’s the one I find hardest to describe. That’s because Boni’s long poem is unlike any other poem I’ve ever read before. Boni, who is from the Côte d’Ivoire, is an important figure in African literature and alos a renowned philosopher. I think this book is striking for the way it walks through a poetic landscape, even in translation, with imagery that is simultaneously immediate and mythic/abstract. As a reader, I felt both grounded and displaced, as if I was asked to breathe an atmosphere both expansive and existential. It makes me think: aren’t the best books of poetry books that feel written for the poet themselves— like, the poet is just inviting you in for a listen?
If you listed ten books of poems off the top of your head, what would they be? I’m v. curious— please let me know.