Reflecting on Spring’s Poetry

Featuring ghazals, “whiteout erasure” poems, and bops, the innovative poems in this collection, comprised of three titled parts, explore gender, inheritance, violence, and survival. I found “Vows for a Herring Cove Wedding Amongst Loves and Plovers” by Williams especially stunning. I read and revisited it, admiring the rhyme of the title, how the words love and lovers live inside of Plovers, the sparse end punctuation. And its final couplet made me scoop my heart up off of the floor, “And dear Candace when did you know you’d found love? / Love is not found—love is the weaving we do each day”

In Eilbert’s third poetry collection, the opening and titular poem, “Overland,” begins, “It isn’t useful to celebrate being alive. / But I’d like to be generous. . . .” In four numbered sections, these tender poems examine grief and memory, disasters and light, and nature and science. Some sentences left me breathless, like this one from “The Lake”: “Never have I been in a weather / more like my moods.” And some sentences gutted me, like this one from “Consultation”: “Nobody was ever / around to guard me like a ghazal.” I see myself studying this book — full of wisdom — carefully, scribbling definitions in the margins and handwriting quotes in my notebook.

While flying over the West Coast and the Pacific Ocean, I devoured Mitchell’s intimate debut collection. With my phone turned off, I scribbled notes on the back of my boarding pass, which worked another full-time job as my bookmark, and I speckled page edges with hearts and lines and even a star and an exclamation point. Unfolding in two parts, this delves into, of course, horses and family, names, and growing up on a farm. Beyond the gorgeous cover, gorgeous poems await from “Kentucky River Palisades” to “Great-Grandma Weaver” to “As We Sang on Cinder Blocks.”

Since the publication of Simulacra by Matthews in 2017, I’ve been a fan of the poet’s work, and this much-anticipated collection from the Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, does not disappoint. Through “[e]xtraction”s and “[e]xtraction and extension”s of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations as well as contrapuntal and prose poems, this interrogates childhood and parenthood, fear and hope, and language and mythology. I read this slowly, and I read each poem at least twice, and still it, along with its accompanying black-and-white images, is one I want to revisit. A short list of just three of the poems I keep flipping back to: “etymology,” “His Eye on the Sparrow,” and “Nevertheless.”

In this captivating chronological compilation, the “Introduction” offers background on the Vietnamese writer, “Tuệ Sỹ, born in 1943, joined a Zen order at the age of ten and later became an eminent Buddhist scholar, professor, poet, and translator.” Reflecting on dreams, the sky, spirituality, and wandering, I leafed through this in an afternoon, a night, and a morning, carrying it with me in my purse. Physically beautiful, the original poems appear in bright green and the translations in black. Take in these two breathtaking lines from “Refrains for Piano”: “Back then I loved you / Restless mountain moon”

Funny and compelling, this stellar collection from Fernandes begins with “Love Poem” and ends with “Tired of Love Poems,” and so much love and desire and friendship resides between. Told in four parts, every sentence of this wowed me in one way or another or in myriad ways. Traveling to New York, Paris, Shanghai, Venice, Saturn, and elsewhere, this exploration of beloveds and cats, cemeteries and cities, and flowers and joy delighted me. Seriously, I want a copy for every room, a copy for every tote. Immediately after finishing this, I added the poet’s previous collection, Good Boys, to my TBR list.