Ballistics: poems

by Billy Collins
New York : Random House, c2008.

In this book of poems, former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins ruminates on the everyday, love, divorce, solitude, and more.

The poems are free verse with two or three lines per stanza and hardly a rhyme, but full of succinct and memorable images such as in "Divorce":

Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.

It's not dense, but it's not simple, either, as I ponder the layers of meaning in the imagery. Some of his poems are playful, such as "Adage," which begins,

When it's late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it's a little more complicated than that.

He then proceeds to pick apart love and adages, and cleverly turn their meanings to his purposes. Every now and then, he captured a feeling that I instantly understood but could never put into words, such as a reaction of sorrow and guilt "On the Death of a Next-Door Neighbor":

The harmony of this house, not his,
might be missing a voice,
the hallways jumpy with the cry of the telephone --

This was my first collection of Billy Collins' poems, and won't be the last.

Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night

by Joyce Sidman
illustrated by Rick Allen
Boston [Mass.] : Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2010.

The look of this Newbery-Honor winning book is deceptively simple. It is the size of a picture book. Instead of a linear story, however, the text is made up of poems tracing the course of night from dusk to dawn by focusing on varying aspects such as nocturnal animals, trees, and the moon. Each poem is on the left-hand side of the page, with a small illustration; a larger illustration fills most of the opposite page. On the far right of the illustration, in smaller font that could easily be ignored when reading to a younger or restless audience, is a short paragraph filled with fascinating tidbits about the subject of the poem.

I confess I was so focused on the text - poetry and nonfiction - that I glossed over the illustrations at first. Then, I read about the process on the title page, which made me take a second look. The method used is relief printing, a process in which a drawing is transferred to wood which is then carved, covered in ink, and printed onto paper. In order to create colorful prints as are in this book, this process of carving, inking, and printing must be done multiple times in multiple colors - and aligned perfectly. Think that sounds like a lot of work? Read on: "The prints for Dark Emperor were each printed from at least three blocks (and in some instances as many as six) and then hand-colored with strongly pigmented watercolor called gouache." Wow. And I had thought of them as fairly simple! I had to page through again, this time in awe of the amount of work it took to create each illustration. This is a truly lovingly crafted book of poetry, nonfiction, and illustration.

Love That Dog

by Sharon Creech
New York: Scholastic, 2003 (orig. published in 2001).

Jack doesn't want to write poems, because that's girl stuff. But as he continues writing in his English journal over the course of the school year, he records his reactions to what he's learning, talks to his teacher, and - yes - even writes a poem or two.

Despite Jack's protestations, the whole novel is in verse and took me less than an hour to read. It's a fairly simple story that incorporates both famous poetry and the story of Jack's dog. The poems read by Jack's teacher that he reacts to in his writing are included in the back, making it easy to use this as an introduction to poetry for elementary school kids. Overall, it strikes me as a book that would tend to appeal more to adults than children.

Happy National Poetry Month!

Every April I read a selection of poetry for National Poetry Month. Does anyone else do this? If so, I'd love to hear about your selections.

This year, I chose Native Guard, a collection that had me alternately holding back tears and wishing I could read a history of the American Civil War:

Native Guard
by Natasha Trethewey
Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin), 2007.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection by Natasha Trethewey contains twenty-six poems divided into three sections. Each section's content is linked thematically as the poet examines her grief over her mother's death, the history of the eponymous "Native Guard," and growing up of mixed race in the South.  The themes sound disparate, but are truly linked, often by the repetition of a thought or phrase, so that the collection as a whole flows together unmistakeably.  Indeed, though I sometimes paused to linger on a single poem, I more often found myself wanting to go on before I lost the connecting thread.

I do not read much poetry; after reading Native Guard, I have determined that I do not read enough poetry. Each poem reads simply - by which I do not mean that it is easy, but that I do not have to attack it with a sledgehammer to determine its meaning - contains strong emotion, and begs to be read aloud and savored. Though I find it hard in such a well-seamed collection to pick out one or two pieces as favorites, I often turned back to the first poem, "Theories of Time and Space," and had to stop reading to hold back tears when I came to "Graveyard Blues." This will definitely be one of my most memorable reads of the year.