Poetry Recommendations | 06/30/2009 12:00 am

5 Awe-Inspiring Poetry Reads, by Katha Pollitt

From Wisława Szymborska to Natasha Tretheway, the award-winning author of The Mind-Body Problem recommends these five reads to kindle your passion for prose.

By Katha Pollitt

Editor’s Note: Katha Pollitt is the author of The Mind-Body Problem: Poems and five other books. A poet, essayist and columnist for The Nation, she is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting grant.

Inspired to read some poetry right this minute? Consider reaching for Katha’s top five picks:

Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected — These wry, ironic, tender poems by the Polish Nobel Prize winner take in everything from a cat in an empty apartment to the devastation of war. Oh, and love. there’s that too.

Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems — White-hot poems drawn from the ordinary life of an extraordinary poet — love, children, marriage, divorce, men, women, family trauma, sex, life.

Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar — Intense, playful, hilarious poems that take the traditions you learned about in school and turn them inside out.

C.P Cavafy, C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems — Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Homoeroticism meets Greece, ancient and modern, to make unforgettable tragedy and beauty.

Natasha Tretheway, Native Guard — This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection sets the African American past and present in tender, elegiac verse that manages to be both edgy and classical.

Click here to read Katha Pollitt Argues: Poetry Is Not Dead Yet

6 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment

What? No W.S. Merwin? The best American poet IMO, except for Bob Dylan, now writing. Cavafy is superb but I prefer George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis. Szymborska is excellent but so are Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz and Agnieszka Osiecka. And where are Carol Duffy And Adrienne Rich?

By FP2 on 06/30/2009 8:53 am

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Well, Frank, she couldn’t get them all in I suppose–-her list is an eclectic bunch. Don’t you just love Merwin and he is such a mensch. My list of poets would go on for miles.

By phyllisDoylePepe on 06/30/2009 9:22 am

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My list too Phyllis, and Merwin I’ve loved since the late 60’s—all lists I suppose are eclectic by their very nature and provenance. Mine is a eclectic as anyone’s :-)

By FP2 on 06/30/2009 9:26 am

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A better question to ask me would be who my favorite poets are this year: Barbara Crooker, George Bilgere, Cathy Smith Bowers, BF Fairchild, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Maxine Kumin. All contemporary, living poets. I buy at least three hundred poetry books a year and I’m not an MFA student or currently teaching.

By JoanMazza on 06/30/2009 4:39 pm

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At Katha’s suggestion on our college class listserve, I thought I’d spend my two cents. Timothy Steele ("Sapphics against Anger"), Ann Sexton (pretty much anything) are lovely and very accesible. Wallace Stevens is my personal favorite, although less accessible. "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" and "The Idea of Order at Key West" are, for me, just transportive. Anna Akhmatova’s Collected Poems and Pushkin’s "Eugene Onegin" (Oxford Ed., James Falen trans) are volumes to which I often return.

And if you can get beyond the blood, guts, and testosterone, Homer’s Iliad is soaringly beautiful and more profound than one might expect from viewing Brad Pitt et.al.

A.Rossi

By arnoldrossi on 06/30/2009 5:36 pm

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Sharon Olds is a very talented poet. However, poems with titles like "After 37 Years My Mother Apologises For My Childhood" and "Killing My Sister’s Fish" are not for me.

By LucianRudd on 07/01/2009 1:21 am