The best books for people who enjoy poetry that looks like poetry

In line after line, Gilbert proves that poetry—more than any other medium—has the power to fully encapsulate the human condition and express emotions that very often seem beyond the power of speech.

I read this book as a lament and elegy. The title poem charts her mother’s descent into dementia and death, all recounted with a journalist’s sense of detail and an artist’s sense of compassion. I love the way her deft handling of form—in this case, a sonnet sequence—drags the reader into the slow decline.

The fourteen poems create sort of a meta (or mega) sonnet, with the last line of one poem repeated or echoed in the first line of the next. Every page has a line or phrase that stops me cold—I just have to reread it and let it fully sink in. Gilbert is well known for her books of feminist criticism, but in my view, it’s her poetry that will endure.

I love the music in these poems! I love the wry wit and unexpected turn of phrase—which may well be Salter’s hallmark. The title is, of course, a vivid example of her playful phrasing.

Salter is a deft formalist, and I am impressed by her effortless handling of some very demanding forms: villanelles, quatrains, sonnets, blank verse, haiku, and ghazals, not to mention various invented rhyme schemes. She is also a master of the slant rhyme, which, for a poet, is akin to the blue note in jazz.

As a parent, I am particularly moved by the poems about her daughters, which are tragically poignant and all too familiar. Salter is a devotee of James Merrill—one of my central poetic influences—and I think she has carried on his tradition more than any other poet I can name.

This book, justly honored with the Pulitzer Prize, surprised me with its formal range and intensity of experience.

Trethewey is celebrated as a chronicler of our collective history, but I was far more taken with the poems of personal history—and, more specifically, personal loss. The poems that examine the absence left by her mother’s untimely death are, to me, the defining poems of the book. These often exemplify her gift for presenting the most telling detail or selecting the word that will resonate on the broadest level.

Let me hone in on one poem, “Myth,” a recasting of the Orpheus story. What astonished me about this poem was the formal structure. It consists of two sections of nine lines, each arranged in terza rima stanzas. The second section rewrites the first half—in reverse! The effect is to convey the experience of descending into the darkness of the underworld and then returning along the same path. It’s no wonder Trethewey was chosen to serve as US Poet Laureate.

There was a time in our lives when we all loved poetry; this book will remind you why.

Stallings is the standard-bearer for new formalist poetry, which often looks to classical Greek myths for inspiration. I love the way she recasts familiar myths in a way that elucidates our modern condition. As with her other books, I was impressed—awed—by her ability to breathe new life into traditional forms and devise entirely new forms.

A prime example is “Three Poems for Psyche,” which veer(s) toward a contemplation of motherhood while recasting themes of domestic strife and time’s impassivity. I was floored by the first poem—essentially a palindrome, with each line of the first stanza repeated in the second—in reverse.

I love when poetry does things that prose simply cannot do, and you can rely on Stallings to do exactly that. The end words in “Alice in the Looking Glass,” for example, are not rhymes but opposites. So, “there” is paired with “here,” “left” with “right.” In this way, the form is physically recreating the experience of gazing in a mirror. This is the sort of genius you might expect from someone who was honored with a MacArthur.

This book once again shows that dead white men do not hold a monopoly on great formalist verse. Espaillat hails from the Dominican Republic, and Spanish is her first language.

Many of the poems in this book deal directly with the difficulties, ambiguities, and opportunities of straddling two languages and cultures—particularly the troubling association with colonialism and imperialism inherent in both English and Spanish (conquistadors, anyone?).

I admire her easy handling of traditional forms—sonnets are apparently her favorite. What I love most is how these poems behave like the poems we knew as children, with satisfying rhyme and meter, while entertaining the themes we ponder as adults—power, history, exile, and language itself.

I find it interesting that this book—her first—was published relatively late in her life; perhaps that’s why it marries the energy of an author’s first book with the wisdom and understanding of an author’s last.