A year of remarkable poetry

Looking back on this year, it seems impossible not to acknowledge that the most notable and best volumes of poetry are books of poems by well-known writers (great or late-great) and writers in their middle years. They are either collected poems, a life’s work, or new poems completing or adding to a substantial body of work. Poet Charles Wright once said about the late Donald Justice that he “gave himself the hardest set of instructions of any poet,” then produced poems of great formal elegance, tough-mindedness and intelligent music. Justice’s “Collected Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $25) displays his seemingly infinite variations on composition and a deft sure grace that characterizes every line. From a poem written about Miami, his birthplace:

And the great bourgeois criminals safely lodged

Under the tile roofs of the first suburbs,

Living their lives out, bloody and circumspect,

While on quiet corners, in the morning light,

New schools stood humbly waiting for their children.

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was a true poet of the 20th century, and his poems reflect that history: work in the Resistance movement in Poland in World War II, life under Communism, years in America. The poems in “Second Space” (Ecco: 112 pp., $23.95), translated by the author with the distinguished poet Robert Hass, are new, written before his death this year at 93. His powerful spirit of inquiry remains undimmed here, though his dream-like lyrical interrogation of mortality is either despairing or lighted with a brave hope.

It is interesting to think that Milosz had a sensibility much like Justice’s -- but the events of his life forever altered his voice, gave it lyric and manifesto timbre, and ultimately confirmed a poet’s allegiance to an eternal aesthetic climate:

I was not made to live anywhere except in Paradise....

Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.

Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.

Jean Valentine’s “Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003” (Wesleyan University Press: 286 pp., $29.95) won this year’s National Book Award -- late recognition for this neglected poet of quiet lyric force. The term “innovative” can be legitimately applied to Valentine, and unlike much “experimental” poetry, these are poems of intense pathos and great emotional depth. She has been perfecting this startling self-erasing style, the Valentine voice, for years.

... she worked for words

word by word

up Mt. Fear till

she got to her name: it was

“she sang.”

Adrienne Rich dedicates the poems in “The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004” (W.W. Norton: 114 pp., $22.95) to Valentine -- and the departure in style evident here seems fashioned after Valentine’s architectural line: attenuated and impressionistic. Yet ultimately Rich’s subject matter, as always, powers the poems:

We sang them to naps told stories made

Shadow animals with our hands

wiped human debris off boots and coats

sat learning by heart the names

Rich’s twinning of fury and compassion seems impossible to accomplish without overstatement -- yet these new poems emerge in a grieving and hypnotic music and drift closer to a kind of collective elegy without sacrificing exhortative power.

In Richard Howard’s “Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 440 pp., $35), the work (to paraphrase my earlier review of the book in this newspaper) testifies to the rewards that his faith in the Olympian perspective provide: poetry of constant reappraisal, giving back truth to the demands of art.

Richard Wilbur sets before us in “Collected Poems, 1943-2004” (Harcourt: 608 pp., $35) 60 years of masterful poems, including translations, children’s verse and riddles. The range, resonance and steady superlative achievement of this array of work reaffirms Wilbur’s towering literary reputation:

A woman I have never seen before

Steps from the darkness of her townhouse door

At just that crux of time when she is made

So beautiful that she or time must fade.

Philip Levine’s “Breath” (Alfred A. Knopf: 96 pp., $23) continues his rapid trajectory straight to the heart of a terrible and beautiful America, an America made up of memory, elegy, unanswered prayer and his remarkably tender tough-guy details:

Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner ...

A wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs ... frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices

of spent breath after eight hours of night work.

“Strike Sparks, Selected Poems, 1980-2002” (Alfred A. Knopf: 208 pp., $16.95) demonstrates unforgettably why Sharon Olds is such a beloved, widely read poet. The poems always face their subjects head-on and take every risk getting emotion on the page. If she is read for staggering blows and knockouts, she is also read for her amazing lyrical wonder:

... we lifted up

gently from one tip of the continent

and did not stop until we set down lightly on the

other edge. I walked into his room

and watched his chest rise slowly

and sink again, all night.

Two younger poets, Carl Phillips (“The Rest of Love,” Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 80 pp., $20) and Lucie Brock-Broido (“Trouble in Mind,” Knopf: 88 pp., $23) also published remarkable books -- each a deepening of poetic obsession and a superb fulfillment of early promise. *