How to choose a poetry book

Czeslaw Milosz is a Nobel Laureate in Literature (1980). I’m rereading one of his works, Road-side Dog, and quite enjoying it. Some weeks ago, I effusively shared with the Better Half [BH] some of the pieces in that volume. Subsequently, BH presented me with two other volumes of Milosz’ poetry: New and Collected Poems 1931 -- 2001, and Selected and Last Poems 1931 -- 2004. I’ve but briefly glanced at the former and am about halfway through the latter. Much to my dismay and frustration, I’ve thought I understood  and enjoyed no more than two or three poems of what I’ve read thus far. I find the experience somewhat comparable to partially assembling a jigsaw puzzle without benefit of the box top and with perhaps a third or half of the pieces missing.

Milosz isn’t the only poet I’ve found challenging in recent days. I’ve previously read, thought I understood, and enjoyed several of Kathleen Jamie’s works such as Sightlines and The Overhaul. On that basis, for Christmas last year I asked either Santa or BH for a copy of Jamie’s Selected Poems. In the last day or so I read the first three or four poems in that volume and have no concept of what she’s writing about there. Perhaps the difference is European rather than American frames of reference and context. I wouldn’t blame you if you were thinking perhaps it’s the reader rather than the poet that’s lacking. I admit to that possibility but would point out this extract from a Poetry Foundation discussion:

Many of the translators’ notes in this issue refer to the difficulty of translation, and many refer in one way or another to Robert Frost’s view that “poetry is what is lost in translation.” Reading Aleksandar Hemon’s translator’s note, are you inclined to agree or disagree with Frost? How does the language that we speak affect our understanding of ourselves?

For the past year or two, I’ve found myself drawn more and more to poems about rural living, nature, hunting, fishing and foraging by North American poets, both indigenous and other. I have my eye on a recently published volume by a poet new to me although I’m familiar with some of her prose. I’m encouraged because her volume is reviewed in the most recent issue of TROUT magazine and it’s been blurbed by a different poet whose work I’m already looking forward to reading. I’m going to take an easy out and provide a link to the publisher’s web page on her book: How You Walk Alone in the Dark.

Now, the secret hidden in the preceding is that I will be checking into each of those who blurbed Dark to see if any of their works look interesting and appealing enough to get my hands on. It won’t take me forever to finish Jamie and Milosz and my reading diet requires variety.

Time Travel by Erin Block

August 31, 2022 ~ ONE ART

Time Travel

Where would you go
if you could go anywhere.
That’s what people ask.
From the time we’re born,
desperate to get away
like a coyote in a trap.
And I’ve never known what to say
until just now after the rain’s stopped,
just before dark,
just before I knead tortilla dough
with the hands I use to braid my mother’s hair
down her back to childhood—
do I know the answer—
and it’s up the mountain
to where the ravens are cawing.
Because it’s never not something:
a bear, a turkey, a body
cached by a lion.
They’re better than a bloodhound
for a missing person
and if you’re looking for a reason,
they have it.
Tucked in tailfeathers;
held in beaks like splintered bone
that rain down ash when they speak.
I’ll bring my mother with me,
walking over the ridge to find them.
There she’ll remember where she’s gone
and how to get back home.

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