Take a poem to lunch

Have you read any delicious poems lately? You can recognize them by their crisp images and yummy words.

Similar to vitamins and minerals needed to replenish weary body cells, poems can replace junk-food thoughts with revitalizing nutrients for the body, mind, and soul.

A problem comes, however, in trying to find appealing poems to devour. Many of them go on and on with nothing new to give those of us who want more than empty calories or rehashed left-overs. Some poems make us turn up our noses at their saccharine sweetness while others seem gross enough to make us gag!

Poems need to be smooth, edible, and not stick in the throat.

Poems need texture, salt, spice, and a colorful garnish.

Poems need to be more melodic than a dinner bell.

As a lifelong lover of poetry, I’ve had the joy of sampling poems with enough variety for almost any taste. A couple of years ago, I wrote about some of those recommendations in “Favorite poets, poetry, and why.” Since then, new works have come to my attention as review copies arrived from poetry book publishers. I’ve undoubtedly missed many, but the following links can help to expand your versatile menu for a healthy, creative life of poetry:

Poetry by some of my favorite poets:

The Life and Death of Poetry: poems by Kelly Cherry

Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns

Songs from a Wild Place and Estuaries by Jason Kirkey

Eyes Have I That See by priest-poet John Julian

Remembering Softly: a life in poems by Catherine Lawton

Anthologies with works by many poets:

St. Peter’s B-List, anthology

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology

The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry


Reviews by poet-author Mary Harwell Sayler
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The Paraclete Poetry Anthology

Paraclete Press kindly sent me a complimentary copy of The Paraclete Poetry Anthology to review, and what a treasure it is! As the Foreword by former editor-publisher Jon M. Sweeney reminds us:

“Poems help us to quell doubts as well as raise questions. Poems help us explore our emotions and spark our imaginations. And they slow us down. To read a poem well is to go slowly, and every good poems resists what’s easy.”

An “easy” poem often tells us what a poet wants to say, instead of showing us. Often, too, the poet gets locked into a rhyme pattern that makes the easy poem a medley of sounds at the expense of sense, insight, or visual accompaniment.

By contrast, Mark S. Burrows, the editor of the anthology, discusses “A Sense of Presence” in his Introduction to “Poetry and the Education of the Soul.” He calls on poems to “animate our soul, that part of the self beyond the reach of worldly ambition and outward achievement. They hold before us the dimension of spiritual experience…..” and “initiate us into mystery.”

As the Introduction goes on to say: Poems “offer us language lifted into song, even if we must often learn to listen patiently for this music in the startlements of metaphor and unexpected syntax. In such ways poems turn aside from the didactic and speak primarily through innuendo and allurement, preferring indirection to more frontal modes of speech and leading us through and beyond the facts along often meandering paths of the imagination.”

Poetry helps us to notice, ponder, and pay attention. “For what matters is not that we grasp the poem, but it grasps us.”

If you’re a poet, the Introduction alone provides remarkable tutelage in writing. Then both poetry writers and readers can go on to enjoy the collection of poems that poet, professor, and editor Burrows chose according to his highly informed standards.

Take, for example, the first lines of the first poem in the book:

“On the threshold of the poem shake off the dust
the powder of hate from your soul
set aside passion
so as not to defile words.”

In the poem “Heavenly City,” Scott Cairns writes:

“…The world remains a puzzle,

no matter how many weeks one stands
apart from it, no matter how one tries

to see its troubled surfaces, or hopes
to dip beneath them for a glimpse of what it is

that makes this all appear to tremble so.”

In “Morning Lament” by the late Phyllis Tickle, to whom this anthology is dedicated, we catch another glimpse of poetry:

“In their awakened morning life,
They limply lie – my lilting lines –
Too labored now to fly,
And loosely hold in languid grasp
The half-remembered chants
Of lyrics lost in melody.”

Fr. John-Julian takes us on an insightful journey in “Long Wanderings” where:

“One chooses
and the other roads are gone,
wending
into foothills which
will always be horizon now
and never home –“

Thankfully editor-poet Mark S. Burrows translated a few poems by the Iranian poet SAID with lines such as these:

“look o lord
I don’t sing your praises
but I seek you
with my limbs
which I’ve tamed just for you
for I want to keep watch over your word
so that love may be found anew
and we win back our wildness.”

Toward the end of this highly recommended anthology, Editor Burrows also translates poems by Rilke, but in between his skilled translations you’ll find contemporary poets whose work you won’t want to miss.

Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer reviewer, ©2016

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology, paperback


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The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry

When I requested a review copy of The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry, which Seashell Press kindly sent to me, I thought the company had published a collection of poems by well-known and not-so-known poets. Come to find out though, this 2011 anthology, which originally saw publication in 1996, has now gone into its fourth printing. Oh, for my books of poems to do the same!

Since my bookshelves at home contain many fine poetry anthologies, the success of this edition intrigued me. Let’s face it: No matter how famous a memorable poem has become, publishers can put them together only so many times before poetry book-buyers like me start to catch on to little more than repackaging. Not so with this book!

As the editor, Christopher Burns, says in the introduction, “Great poetry is personal.” Ironically, this does not mean self-centered expressionism but, more likely, the opposite, for “It is in poetry, not on the Senate floor, that we debate the issues of honor, loyalty, love and respect for nature that are the foundations of our society. Poetry is a truth toward which our reason turns and we measure its strength by the way we feel.”

Although most poets and writers identify with “the contours of life, the loneliness of the artist, the uses of war, the role of nature, the constancy of love and the coming on of death” as individuals, we also recognize universal themes that say, “This is the singing of our tribe, called out across the noisy business of daily life.” Nevertheless, we’re to “Take it personally” as we feel, care, reach out, and swap stories.

The interweaving of poetry from centuries ago and the present day add to the call-and-response effect this anthology often gives as the poems interact with one another and with us as readers.

For example, that wonderful poem “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson (1919) which opens the book, calls out where “Darkness covered everything,/ Blacker than a hundred midnights/ Down in a cypress swamp” until, eventually, “This Great God,/ Like a mammy bending over her baby,/ Kneeled down in the dust/ Toiling over a lump of clay/ Till He shaped it in His own image;/ Then into it He blew the breath of life,/ And man became a living soul.”

These lines help us to recall the beginnings we have in common to the core, and then Anne Sexton gives her 1975 version of “The Earth,” where God “does not envy the soul so much./ He is all soul/ but He would like to house it in a body/ and come down/ and give it a bath/ now and then.” In “Yet Do I Marvel,” Countee Cullen (1923) wanted to know why God would “make a poet black, and bid him sing.”

In the section entitled “For My People,” Walt Whitman (1855) sings his “Song of Myself” while Emma Lazarus (1886) focuses on “The New Colossus” in the Statue of Liberty who cries “With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”

And then, a poet unknown-to-me, Charles Reznikoff (1936) insists, “I will write songs against you,/ enemies of my people,” before admitting, ”I will pelt you/ with the winged seeds of the dandelion./ I will marshal against you/ the fireflies of the dusk.”

Focused on the natural and the unnatural, love and war, life and death, the anthology gathers poems from the 16th century to the present day with an enormous range of voices from the melodious to the discordant, but each with something to say and a unique perspective or intriguing story from which to speak.

Besides the pleasure of seeing these universal themes approached from many directions, I appreciated “discovering” poets whose work I have not previously read mingled with old favorites, some of whom have fallen out of favor in recent years and anthologies. Realizing this, however, helped me to see that many anthologies aim to preserve the popular poetic works of a particular time, whereas this anthology concentrates on well-written poems, yes, but on poems that speak clearly and passionately to and for the people.

© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler


The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry, paperback



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