April brings the pleasant burden of National Poetry Month. Burden, you say? Yes, the burden of letting you know something about the considerable number of books published by well-known and up-and-coming poets released this month. We’ll do what we can. Your best bet is to come to the store and savor for yourself. Here’s a sampling –


The Ghost Soldiers by James Tate ($22.95 Ecco) What should we say he is? Chaplinesque? Kafkaesque? Certainly Tate has kinship with each of those seminal artists. His work combines the endearingly rueful comic presence of Charlie Chaplin with the awkward interpersonal and societal disconnects of Franz Kafka. Writing about a Tate piece becomes so much blather. They stand solely for themselves. He write short (one to three pages) direct, fable-like poems that are compelling, simple, strange, and as palpable as Flannery O’Connor’s. At their simplest his pieces are enjoyable farces. Some, though, transcend the farce and present the tragicomic human experience in a manner that few other writers are capable of. Excerpting a piece of his is simple, having that excerpt stand for the complexity of the experience of a piece of his is not possible.


Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart ($25 FSG) Frank Bidart writes exquisitely dark poems of longing and discontent. The preeminence of loss, whether of money, sex, or psychological power, or all of them, fuels his intricately honed work. This, from the poem “Seduction” -- “Show him that you see he carries / always, everywhere, an enormous // almost impossible to balance or bear // statue of himself: burden that / flattering him // dwarfs him, like you. Make him // see that you alone decipher within him / the lineaments of the giant. Make him // see that you alone can help him shape // the inchoate works of his hand, till what / the statue is he is.” His vision is jarring and intense; his poems are pure distillations of desire, struggle, and failure. He writes them so beautifully.


Quaker Guns by Caroline Knox ($14 Wave) Masterfully crafted whimsy with serious quirk, quirky seriousness, a vocabulary swinging from colloquial to archaic, and plenty historical, scientific, and literary bits -- this is the deeply pleasurable poetry of Caroline Knox, long a store favorite. Her latest volume contains, as she lays out in one poem, “two sonnets, two haiku, / a sestina, an homage / to George Herbert, some tercets, / a masque, …an elegy, / a recipe, a song, an ABC,” and more. But that just describes the skillfully built boxes, not their beguiling contents, like an owl and a lark discussing Emerson and Green Acres, a comparison of a wind turbine to Mozart, her husband’s dream of a foam rubber statue of Mary, and the complexities of holiday shopping -- “It was Christmas and I was stuck / wrapping fungible musk potions for chums, // but there was no snow except fake in stores / where I purchased the above and the sparkly.” You know what they say: it’s Caroline Knox’s world….


Unmentionables by Beth Ann Fennelly ($23.95 Norton) Beth Ann Fennelly is a trip -- well, her poetry is. She is a fearless traveler, sending back dispatches that range from the raucous to the heartbreaking. Motherhood, childhood, womanhood, these are often the entry points for her comic and mournful examinations of what it means to be human: “Fast child of a fast mother, / it’s been years but I haven’t forgotten / being dark. It comes right back. It’s like pushing someone off a training bike.” Two particularly strong sequences anchor the book. “The Kudzu Chronicles” are just that, the author finding in this tenacious, imported vine both metaphor of her own “pushy” self now transplanted in the south (“Hey lady, / where I’m from? They call me exuberant”) and her enveloping refuge from the flat Illinois of her childhood, where “one had perspective enough to see the ways one’s life was botched.” The other sequence sings in caring, contentious response to John Berryman’s “Dream Songs.” “Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle” conjures the brilliant, troubled poet as well as Fennelly’s own mixed history and searching present, an evocation of and tribute to her “fatuation,” who “lodged a song where others never.”


Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937 – 1947 ($26 Graywolf) This book offers a selection of 176 of William Stafford’s first 400 poems, few of which have seen publication before now. His first book was published in 1960, when he was 46 years old and had been writing for 20 years, including the years he spent in various camps performing alternative service as a conscientious objector during World War II. He appeared to be an awfully sophisticated beginner with that book, but he was no beginner. These poems, often simple and rough, show early his compassion and his wonderful mixture of plain-spokenness and odd imagery, for example, “one white bird bears the noon / on a single note / and roofs the ferns with pools / from a single throat.” Fans of Stafford will cherish this collection. Readers new to him will discover the talent and heart that marked his career.


And take a look at our April 2008 calendar listings for descriptions of Rick Barot's Want; Susan Hutton's On the Vanishing of Large Creatures; and Timothy Kelly's Extremities.