Here are eleven (our favorite number again) more new and noteworthy poetry titles (plus one audio, for an even dozen) featured in our International Poetry and Literature collections. This is a companion list to last year’s recommended poetry post.
- Red Rover by Susan Stewart
- Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa
- One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds
- The Truro Bear and Other Adventures by Mary Oliver
- My Vocabulary Did This to Me by Jack Spicer
- The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin
- Voices by Lucille Clifton
- One of a Kind by Jack Micheline
- Du Fu: A Life in Poetry translated by David Young
- The Coral Sea by Patti Smith [Audiobook]
In addition, in anticipation of the upcoming Billy Collins poetry reading in Pittsburgh at the Drue Heinz Lecture Series, the Main Library’s poetry discussion group, 3 Poems By, will be taking a look at the work of the former Poet Laureate on Tuesday, February 12th. The discussion is open to all; details may be found at the 3 Poems By website. Mr. Collins has also just released a much-praised new collection, Ballistics, which you can snap up for the right price (free) at the library anytime.
In preparation for that meeting, I’ve been talking to folks about Collins and reading lots of his poems. A colleague of mine recommended some of his favorite Billy Collins poems to me. Here’s one, short and sweet, with Collins’s signature humor, laced with a mitigating thread of melancholy:
No Time
In a rush this weekday morning,
I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery
where my parents are buried
side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.Then, all day, I think of him rising up
to give me that look
of knowing disapproval
while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.Billy Collins
Yes, indeed.
Don
Eleventh Stack 