From time to time, the staff of America's longest-running poetry-only bookshop, the logically-named Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, release a list of recommended titles from their current stock. Here is their list for the last week of December 2019.
SOME TREES by John AshberyComparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is “the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible.” After the publication of Some Trees, W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didn't understand a word of it. Most reviews were negative. But in this first book of poems from one of the century's most important poets, one finds the seeds of Ashbery's oeuvre, including the influence of French surrealists—many of whom he translated—and abstract expressionism.
WAKE, SIREN by Nina MacLaughlin"I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people's tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I'll tell it myself." Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, author Nina MacLaughlin recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men, breathing new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.
MY EMILY DICKINSON by Susan HoweSusan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—shows ways in which earlier scholarship has shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day.
"The father of African literature in the English language and undoubtedly one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century," writes critic Caryl Phillips. Chinua Achebe's award-winning poems are marked by a subtle richness and the political acuity and moral vision that are a signature of all of his work. Focused and powerful, and suffused with wisdom and compassion, Collected Poems is further evidence of this great writer's sublime gifts and it is an essential part of the oeuvre of a giant of world literature.
WOOLGATHERING by Patti SmithIn this small, luminous memoir, the National Book Award-winning author revisits the most sacred experiences of her early years, with truths so vivid they border on the surreal. The author entwines her childhood self—and its "clear, unspeakable joy"—with memories both real and envisioned from her twenties on New York's MacDougal Street.
A THOUSAND MORNINGS by Mary OliverIn this collection, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life's work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.
FELON by Reginald Dwayne BettsThese fierce, dazzling poems tell the story of the effects of incarceration, canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace. Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life.The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion.
The Latin poet Horace is, along with his friend Virgil, the most celebrated of the poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and, with Virgil, the most influential. These marvelously constructed poems with their unswerving clarity of vision and their extraordinary range of tone and emotion have deeply affected the poetry of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herbert, Dryden, Marvell, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Frost, Larkin, Auden, and many others, in English and in other languages. Ferry's inspired new translation of the complete Odes of Horace conveys the wit, ardor and sublimity of the original with a music of all its own.
BLUETS by Maggie NelsonSince it was first published a decade ago, Bluets has drawn scores of readers with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human—via two hundred and forty short pieces, by turns lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue. The new beautiful hardcover edition from Wave Books celebrates Nelson's uncompromising vision, inviting longtime fans and newcomers alike to experience and share in an indispensable work that continues to disrupt the literary landscape.
CEREMONIAL ENTRIES by Joe DeRocheIn these tough-minded and tender-hearted poems, DeRoche explores the spiritual and secular frameworks used to assess the competing claims of body, mind, and soul, and of faith and doubt in divinity, love, and poetry itself. The ceremonies lead from struggles between conflicting goods toward acceptance that the world and our experience of it is always sacred and profane: a place where Satan may be a saint and the light in an image of the infant Jesus Christ can seem as earthbound as celestial, where love can redeem and debase, where poetry can transform, disinfect, and merely feint or fail or cheat.
Grolier Poetry Book Shop, at 6 Plympton Street in Cambridge, is open Tuesday and Wednesday from 11-7, and Thursday through Saturday from 11-6. Find them online at Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram, or on their website at www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org. The Shop is a historic place for poetry lovers and poetry makers, and they deserve your business. Stop by and buy a book, and let them know that Pen & Anvil sent ya.
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