As the Earth spins and April becomes home once again, spring offers a burst of beauty and livelihood to our spirits. Suddenly, there is color, life and the type of sunshine that can cut straight to anyone’s heart. April is full of these springtime poetics, making it the perfect time to celebrate National Poetry Month. From The Michigan Daily Book Review to you, here are our loveliest little poetry recommendations.
*For best existential results: Read outside in the early morning or late evening, as the sun rises or sets. Under these conditions, poetry can enter your tender heart with ease.
Senior Arts Editor Ava Burzycki can be reached at burzycki@umich.edu
“Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver” by Mary Oliver
“How wonderful to be who I am, / made out of earth and water, / my own thoughts, my own fingerprints — / all that glorious, temporary stuff.”
Mary Oliver, above all else, understands what it is to be a soft, tender human and offers an antidote to the whirlwinds of confusing woes within modernity. This is a poetry collection that reminds the reader of the great, wonderful world we live in. It reminds us to slow down, forget the anxieties built into our lives and instead retreat into the small, beautiful moments that make life worthwhile. Her poems come to me in the morning, when I’m staring out the window at the sunrise, drinking a particularly sweet coffee; they come to me at night, when the world becomes suffocating and I need to be reminded of all the possibilities within this one life; they come to me in spring, when sunshine brings the rebirth of the environment and ushers in hope for what the future may hold.
Senior Arts Editor Ava Burzycki can be reached at burzycki@umich.edu
“Civil Service: Poems” by Claire Schwartz
“You cannot solve time, even with death. / The only clue is pleasure.”
What can the poet do? What obligation do they have, when they see injustice? What are the poet’s and reader’s responsibilities to language? Claire Schwartz forces us to reckon with these and other questions in her 2022 poetry collection “Civil Service: Poems.” The book loosely follows a woman named Amira in a dictatorial society populated by unnamed characters referred to by titles like “the Accountant,” “the Intern” and “the Censor.” In clever, thought-provoking verse, Schwartz critiques modern war, politics and the way language is weaponized in pursuit of violence and oppression.
Time and language are corporeal in this book; “Amira pulls the hours around her like a shawl” and “A woman feeds time to a meat grinder” are just two examples of the way Schwartz lends materiality and tangibility to concepts and abstractions. Although her writing can sound like parables, she is quick to remind you that this is not a metaphor — it is just an unspecified example of something that is already happening. With lines like “You lust after dental insurance” and “On payday, he takes his wife and son to Shake Shack,” Schwartz never lets you escape the sheer reality of the things she describes, never lets you take comfort in abstraction.
This book is a masterful, quick, cohesive and thought-provoking read that asks the reader tough questions and, instead of providing easy answers, provides a multitude of them. It reminds us why poets and their writing are important in the first place, and where poetry fits into a society that increasingly seems to devalue its existence.
“Be Holding: A Poem” by Ross Gay
“reaching to keep / from falling, / and lonely for him / I sometimes will study / my own hands, / which are his hands”
This book is another masterpiece in poetic innovation by the author of “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” As its subtitle suggests, “Be Holding” is a nearly 100-page-long poem. Not only that, but it’s all one sentence. Gay uses centered couplets with interspersed photographs to focus on this single clip of a baseline scoop by basketball legend Dr. J (Julius Erving). It’s a master class in paying attention, in the art of observing that is so crucial to poetry. Basketball — a subject not usually associated with poetry — is transformed into a lengthy meditation on not only the baseline scoop itself but family, American racism and Gay’s past.
Even I, someone who didn’t know anything about basketball legends of the ’80s, was transfixed by this book and ended up watching the clip in question half a dozen times throughout my reading, as Gay described things I’d missed. Describing Erving’s scoop, he writes, “and you notice now before the flash / Doc was probably just intending / to dunk simply though emphatically on his own side of the hoop, / but was compelled to soar like this.” Yet somehow the book is also about everything else: “my body is made of my father / reaching to keep from falling,” “we are talking about destroying the world / for the world,” “war photographs in this gallery / tended by a friendly white woman.”
Gay transitions seamlessly from topic to topic in ways that are sometimes arrestingly beautiful. He makes the reader care about what he cares about, writing “ — have you ever decided anything in the air — ” about Dr. J, simply capturing the wonder of the moment when, 50 pages in, you’re sure he’d run out of ways to make that moment new. This book is an example of what poetry can do and how it can teach us to really see the world around us.
“Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections” by Jill Bialosky
“there was a brief sojourn / from the asylum in which the poem was held prisoner”
The subtitle of Jill Bialosky’s latest poetry collection prepares the reader fairly well for what follows in its pages. Bialosky’s poetry covers a range of topics, from global warming to her sister’s suicide to antisemitism, and weaves them together in a way that feels natural. From the beginning (including the cover, which portrays a cross-section of a tree trunk), the metaphor of the tree as the body is clear, and this motif creates a throughline that ties the poem’s sections together. Her writing is strongest when describing and observing the natural world, and she does so in vivid and defamiliarizing detail: “a woman / thrusting her nose into the burst / of a sunflower as if into the face / of God,” “Blossoms are at the very edge / of becoming,” “corpses / of monarchs curled in humble heads of flowers.”
But what makes her perfect for National Poetry Month is her treatment of April itself. April is the month her sister died, but it is also the month when spring begins to assert itself, and Bialosky produces poignant and brutally honest verses that examine the inherent contradiction of life and death that this month holds for her. “Every April a requiem, a re-awakening of dawn, the same chorus / & players,” she writes, going on to reference her sister’s death. She writes, in reference to both T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Dante’s “Inferno,” “Daffodils, survivors of the cruelest month / tossing their heads in sprightly dance from the ground arise.” For those who find the turn from winter into spring melancholy and bittersweet, Bialosky captures the season’s teetering between life and death in remarkable poetic verse.
Daily Arts Writer Emilia Ferrante can be reached at emiliajf@umich.edu.