Recent Poetry Readings

I am really enjoying reading the following poetry book:

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). The Poems of Seamus Heaney. Farrar, 1,296 pages, 2025. VSCPL.

IMPRESSIVE!!!

His complex and interesting metaphors and phrasing is very engaging.

I recently read the following two collections of poems by two authors:

Mina Loy (1882-1966). The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy. Edited by Rober L. Conover. Farrar, 256 pages, 1997. VSCPL. She lived in France. Surrealistic and Futuristic poetic style. Confusing. Independent character.

Joanne Kyger (1934-2017). As Ever: Selected Poems. Penguin, 336 pages, 2002. VSCPL. She lived in the San Francisco area, Bolinas. Part of the SF Renaissance. Clear, down to earth, ordinary life observations. Feminist perspective. Typographical layout is scattered on the pages. My least favorite of the three mentioned here.

Hillcrest by Edward Arlington Robinson

Hillcrest

By Edward Arlington Robinson

1916

(To Mrs. Edward MacDowell)


No sound of any storm that shakes  
Old island walls with older seas  
Comes here where now September makes  
An island in a sea of trees.  
 
Between the sunlight and the shade
A man may learn till he forgets  
The roaring of a world remade,  
And all his ruins and regrets;  
 
And if he still remembers here  
Poor fights he may have won or lost,—
If he be ridden with the fear  
Of what some other fight may cost,—  
 
If, eager to confuse too soon,  
What he has known with what may be,  
He reads a planet out of tune
For cause of his jarred harmony,—  
 
If here he venture to unroll  
His index of adagios,  
And he be given to console  
Humanity with what he knows,—
 
He may by contemplation learn  
A little more than what he knew,  
And even see great oaks return  
To acorns out of which they grew.  
 
He may, if he but listen well,
Through twilight and the silence here,  
Be told what there are none may tell  
To vanity’s impatient ear;  
 
And he may never dare again  
Say what awaits him, or be sure
What sunlit labyrinth of pain  
He may not enter and endure.  
 
Who knows to-day from yesterday  
May learn to count no thing too strange:  
Love builds of what Time takes away,
Till Death itself is less than Change.  
 
Who sees enough in his duress  
May go as far as dreams have gone;  
Who sees a little may do less  
Than many who are blind have done;
 
Who sees unchastened here the soul
Triumphant has no other sight
Than has a child who sees the whole
World radiant with his own delight.
 
Far journeys and hard wandering
Await him in whose crude surmise
Peace, like a mask, hides everything
That is and has been from his eyes;
 
And all his wisdom is unfound,
Or like a web that error weaves
On airy looms that have a sound
No louder now than falling leaves.

25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works
Poetry, Indexes, Anthologies, Research
By Michael P. Garofalo

Tanka Poetry - Quintains
By Mike Garofalo