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