A poet”s bookshelf can never hold enough volumes of other people”s poetry. Whether those volumes are anthologies, collected poems of well-known poets, or hand-printed chapbooks by local poets from your favorite coffee house open mike, reading the works of others is one of the surest ways to keep your own poetic voice strong. This month is rich in releases of new books of poetry, so if the poetry section of your bookshelf is looking a little lean, you might consider adding one or more of this month”s releases to your collection.

Essential Dickinson, a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson, selected by Joyce Carol Oates. Publishers Note:
Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche….

Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.

Reviews: (from The Boston Review)
“Hunger–literal? Sexual? A hunger for the manly attributes of freedom and power?” Oates has selected masterpieces and lesser known poems to illustrate her many concerns: the poet”s bold imagery, energy, wit, mimicry of child”s speech, dream babble, quicksilver moments “recorded in the very instant of manifestation.” This is Dickinson “at the white heat” of ecstasy and its sister, despair, and she continues to hold us in awe. –Emily Fragos
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Selected Poems Gwendolyn Brooks

FROM THE PUBLISHER
The classic volume by the distinguished modern poet and winner of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize that represents her technical mastery, her compassionate and illuminating response to a world that is both special and universal, and her warm humanity.

Author Biography: Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917. Her books include A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, The Bean Eaters, Maud Martha, and In the Mecca.

Jack and Other New Poems – Maxine Kunin

From the Publisher:
“[Kumin] is one of our very best writers, determined to celebrate and mourn, howl and sing.”—Robin Becker

In her fourteenth collection, Maxine Kumin meditates on the social consequences of such events as the bicentennial of the Civil War, and looks to poets writing from circumstances vastly different from her own. With death the central theme, poems of the body and praise songs for beloved animals explore how memory consoles and haunts.

Reviews:
From Booklist
Kumin”s plainspoken poems embody the rhythms, landscape, seasonal shifts, and tamped-down drama of rural New England, although her consciousness and compassion are world embracing. In her last two books, this steadfast observer of animals human and otherwise wrote with great candor about her nearly fatal equestrian accident and her long, long recovery. Here Kumin gets on with life, more interested in what the dog chases up a tree and in how others cope with pain than in her own travails. She even writes in the voices of a rapist, an anorexic in rehab, and a hospice worker. Elsewhere Kumin looks to history for windows onto the mystery of human behavior, musing over a little-known edict of the Civil War called the Jew Order and marveling over the lives of Chang and Eng. She also writes about the women who worked for her mother, the death of a beloved horse, and war and patriotism, and expresses gratitude for the “zen of mowing” in her well-turned, neatly well balanced poems, radiant testimony to life attentively witnessed and cherished. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Three women, three different eras, three very different voices – all celebrated poets whose work inspires and rewards with every reading.