The Poems of Edward Taylor by Edward Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"File bright our rusty brains, and sharpen them."

More than a year ago, while reading Harold Bloom's anthology of American religious poetry, I greatly enjoyed the selections from Edward Taylor, a Puritan poet, for their surprising and fun metaphors and images. I searched and found this out-of-print volume. I don't know that I needed to read all of the poems of Edward Taylor, a great selection would have sufficed. But I did enjoy them and broke up the reading of this comprehensive volume by reading other poetry over the last year.

"Woes Pickled in Revenges Powdering Trough"

I delight in the idea of pickled woes!

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Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"You can't be an NDN person in today's world/ and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature/poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature--hate its guts."

In this fun and provocative volume, contemporary queer, indigenous poet Tommy Pico reflects on his identity and the expectations for what an indigenous poet should write and the tensions and conflicts between the two. His poems are fun and irreverent and break the mold of what most people expect from poetry.

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Cast Away: Poems for Our Time by Naomi Shihab Nye
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fun collection of poems built around what trash Nye has observed and collected. She does a great job of showing how the most mundane things can be turned into art.

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When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Díaz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These searing poems are filled with evocative imagery as they grapple with the complex emotions of a Native family dealing with oppression, drug use, mental illness, and more.

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100 Poems from the Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautiful collection of poems. Among my favorites was this one by The Monk Shun-E and translated by Rexroth

All during a night
Of anxiety I wait.
At last the dawn comes
Through the cracks of the shutters,
Heartless as night.

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Think of Lampedusa by Josué Guébo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I may have not read this book at the right time; I was often distracted. The poems are intense, with stark visual imagery. But not overly dark and somber. They seemed rich and worthy, but required a focus I didn't possess at the time of reading.

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Averno by Louise Glück
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Time passed, and some of it became this.
And some of it simply evaporated;
you could see it float above the white trees
forming particles of ice."

This is now the third book of hers I've read since she won the Nobel. I regret not having read her before, but also feel that arriving at her work precisely now is right. She is an essential voice for expressing the thoughts and feelings of our pandemic moment. The ways in which her poems express beauty deeply acquainted with darkness and suffering that leave you pondering whether they are completely despairing or if there is a glimmer of vital hope?

And this volume is a meditation on death and our how our mortality connects to the earth and our earthiness. For instance, in the title poem. A cultivated field has burned and yet new plants appear in the spring. She concludes with this searing stanza:

"The terrible moment was the spring after his work was erased,
when he understood that the earth
didn't know how to mourn, that it would change instead.
And then go on existing without him."

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The Depths of My Soul: Into the Feels by Steve Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Please don't stop the rain, for it is the pain of an empty soul."

My dear friend Steve Jackson has published his first collection of poetry. As promised by the title and description, this book is deeply emotional. Poems such as "Rockabye" and "Spite and Desire" are intense. I really enjoyed the rhythm of poems like "Gone" and "My Sisters." From "Gone:"

Time
loneliness
9:25 and . . .
tick-tock
43 seconds emptiness

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Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Outside, the snow was falling.
I had been, I felt, accepted into its stillness."

A melancholy work. With a complicated sense of voice, as many of the poems are uttered by a male narrator whose relationship to the author is unclear.

I did not find this book as resonant and powerful as Wild Iris, but still a worthy work.

"I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or perhaps, once one begins,
there are only endings."

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