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New Books - 02/08
Whether or not you're reading this mailer around Valentine's Day, love
and eros take place (one hopes) throughout the year, no? So here is Ted
Kooser's collection, Valentines: Poems ($14.95 Nebraska), a handsome
hardcover edition gathering the annual Valentine's Day poems he wrote and
mailed to a growing list of women, the number topping 2,500 at the end. And
the end is here. There are twenty-three poems in this volume, the last one
being, Kooser says, the last he'll write. The poems, delightful, kind, and
image-rich, are illustrated with Robert Hanna drawings of the rural Nebraska
landscape that infuses Kooser's work.
The Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present ($16 Scribner), edited by David Lehman, is a collection of fine, unapologetically sexy poems presented chronologically by birth year of the poet. Francis Scott Key's "On a Young Lady's Going into a Shower Bath" gets the show started, followed by the likes of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, James Schuyler, and Olena Kalytiak Davis, to name some of the 134 poets represented. Mr. Lehman has chosen the musical and the prosaic, the muscular and the demure, each one a lively dream or fond description.
The poems in Marianne Boruch's Grace, Fallen From ($22.95 Wesleyan) exhibit the engaged contemplation her work is known for. A quiet gravity pervades it. The poetry is grounded -- in nature, the domestic, childhood -- but rises as her unique voice, often dark but also loving, transforms what she sees. She recognizes both "the acid and the praise," knowing that, "Nothing's simple, / not even the start of the day." Here's a poem from the book --
"February"
That sparrow on the trash again, one
leg missing, he
alights and drops down, alights
in this cold, and crooked,
drops down again though he could
fly. He has to, most of the day
I imagine, into its
exhaustion, those moments he
finds a window sill or a patch
of old leaves under some
overhang, his one leg, good wire,
pulled under him, feathers
puffed out -- swollen thing, ridiculous --
for warmth. All the lives I
might have had: this one,
oh, this one.
-- Marianne Boruch
And take a look at our February 2008 calendar for descriptions of Samuel Green's The Grace of Necessity, editor Thom Schramm's Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression; Jeanne Heuving's Transducer, our own J.W. Marshall's Meaning a Cloud, and Richard Kenney's The One-Strand River.
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