Classic and Modern Classic Poetry Collections—from Around the World—You Should Know About
September is National Literacy Month, which raises awareness of the importance of reading and writing skills. As I’ve expressed in previous posts, books are pivotal to my life’s journey. So in celebration of National Literacy Month’s emphasis on reading and writing, I will be providing my thoughts on several books I’ve read.
The first list is poetry.
Some poets from different eras have weathered time because of the timelessness of their poetry. The collections listed here have beauty and depth. Some are from a much earlier era; and some, from a more recent era, are what I consider modern classics for how they illuminate style, place, and culture in a timeless fashion.
Selected Poems, Paul Verlaine
This bilingual poetry collection by Verlaine, who ranks with Baudelaire and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France, captured my attention with its unique craftsmanship. These poems are technical and adhere to style and framework. Even when Verlaine is ambitious with parisyllabic lines, he sticks to a set number of syllables per line (nine in this case):
Imagine fine eyes behind a veil,
Imagine the shimmer of high noon,
Imagine, in skies cooled for autumn,
Blue entanglements of lucent stars.
I read poetry for language, to listen to the rhythm and sound, to sense the meters. This is one of those instances where I couldn’t help but become a bit of a poetry nerd. At the risk of sounding too technical, I was surprised to see that the meters in most of these poems were determined by the syllables per line, and not by the number of beats or stresses. I guess this is why I love reading poetry from different continents and eras, so that I can compare and learn. Language in poetry generally fascinates.
Verlaine was said to be both delicate and callous; his poems are reflections of his contradictions. His translator, Martin Sorrell, says he’s “both a good and a bad poet, but at one and the same time, in tandem.” Take what you may from this.
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
I hold this collection close to the heart because Langston Hughes himself chose the poems that appear here. No editors. Hughes himself. He chose these poems shortly before his death and they include works from his entire career.
Some of the poems he chose are from The Weary Blues collection, which was my introduction to Langston Hughes and how I fell in love with his poetry. His poems are conversational, musical, infused with storytelling. Hughes riffs in rhythmic sentences.
You were my moon up in the sky,
At night my wishing star.
I love you, oh I love you so—
But you have gone so far!(from “Miss Blues’es Child”)
To read Hughes is to hear music, jazz music, and to feel pain and agony made palpable on the page. To read Hughes is to hear of Harlem, the Renaissance that produced great American literature, yet sometimes remains invisible. To read Hughes is to feel a different language, a sample of words.
Langston Hughes was considered a master of American verse. He was an American poet, novelist, social activist, and playwright. He was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
Selected Poems, Ana Akhmatova
When I read Akhmatova, I’m transported to a world of artistic repression, where the whispers of poetic lines seem to tell individual stories of love, oppression, imprisonment, and death, where freedom of expression finds nuance in verse, where voices unheard rise with melody and beat through stanza. Her poems explore feelings of displacement and loneliness, of a traumatized and tortured soul.
I have written down the words
I have long not dared to speak
Dully the heart beats,
This body is not my own(from “Evening Room”)
Her love life was traumatic. Akhmatova was married to the poet Nikolay Gumilyov who was executed in 1921 for activities considered anti-Soviet; Akhmatova then married a prominent Assyriologist Vladimir Shilejko, and then an art scholar, Nikolay Punin, who died in the Stalinist Gulag camps. After that, she turned down several proposals from the married poet, Boris Pasternak.
An imprisoned woman, an author who saw her books banned, and a survivor of war, Akhmatova’s life was not an easy one. In spite of this, she is one of the best-known Russian poets of the 20th century and her works have been widely translated. Having her book on your shelf means owning a collection that tells a specific story of a time and place when the world went awry.
View With A Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, Wislawa Szymborska
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each
second.
When I want to grasp lucidity, to feel the fabric of a thought, poetry aids me. The simple rhetorical strategy Szymborska’s verse employs, the seemingly easy flow and sensual rhythm of her words, reaches a reader in whatever mental space you are, and immediately dissects each unspoken thought.
Although simple, her lines are complex, making you consider the meaning of lines such as this one:
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
This collection reminds you that poetry is meaning pulled neatly into lines. Szymborska’s poems tend to drift from the mundane to the complex, yet never without layered examination of the world, or of self.
We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.(From “View With a Grain of Sand.”)
Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, and translator. She won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson
Sometimes there is only one place to go: within, where the mind and body communicate poetically. Those poets of her time, they stayed securely snuggled into their worlds, while Dickinson traversed the unbeaten paths around them, creating abstract spaces made tangible through musicality. They stayed within their conformed art, and hers elevated both the physical and mental, while she wrote from a house they deemed her prison, but one that would become this artist’s fortress.
Sweet skepticism of the Heart—
That knows—and does not know—
Emily Dickinson did not marry, did not do many of the things expected of a woman living in her century. In fact, it took some time for her art to be seriously recognized. Still, she wrote. She wrote to figure out the pain she lived with. She wrote to conquer her fears. She wrote to bring us introspection through the word. And when she had no friends, when she was betrayed by lovers, she wrote about the solace she found in Nature, the peace she found in the still of the universe.
My best Acquaintances are those
With Whom I spoke no Word—
Over the years, I’ve read a few of her poems here and there, but this edition, this collection, is my favorite. It is one to have on the shelf and revisit. I stayed with this for some time, savored Dickinson’s words, viewed the world through her poet’s eyes.
Save Twilight, Julio Cortázar
I wrote about how I find Cortázar’s poetry dreamlike and unassuming, quiet and beautiful. His poems parallel the tango as they move freely, a new idea or thought occurring between lines.
His poems also include storytelling, something I admire in poetry. For example, in “Sidewalks of Buenos Aires,” he talks about how they called the sidewalk “walkside” when they were little.
Stephen Kessler, the translator of this collection, notes that when he met Cortázar, he noticed that unlike other writers he had encountered, Cortázar was “not interested in being the center of attention.” This made me like him even more.
You gave me stormy weather
with just the shadow of your hand
across my face.
You gave me coldness, distance,
bitter midnight coffee
among empty tables.(from “Maybe the Most Beloved”)
Julio Cortázar is most known for his works in fiction. However, he always considered himself a poet first. He was born in Argentina and lived in Paris as a translator for UNESCO. He is considered internationally as the modern master of the short story.
Dien Cau Dau, Yusef Komunyakaa
Dien Cau Dau. Crazy, is how the Vietnamese referred to the American soldiers in Vietnam. This chapbook is Yusef Komunyakaa’s reflections while in Vietnam during the war. If there ever was an example of a manuscript on the poetics of war, this is it.
Komunyakaa strings together words stunningly. It is lyrical simplicity whose melancholy is hypnotizing:
Something deeper than sadness
litters the alleys like the insides
kicked out of pillows.
There is staccato and syntax, and music. Plus, imagery that stuns and captivates. These poems are about a specific time and place, and yet they are also about emotion and history and the traumas we carry. Like Emily Dickinson’s stylistic choice of the em dash, Komunyakaa uses the symbol ‘&’ instead of ‘and:’
Music divides the evening
I close my eyes & I can see
men drawing lines in the dust.
America pushes through the membrane
of mist & smoke, & I’m a small boy
again in Bogalusa. White Only
signs & Hank Snow.(from “To Do Street”)
Komunyakaa, a Louisiana native, won the Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. I own that collection also, but this chapbook, means something more. You can read about why in this review I wrote a decade ago on Goodreads.
A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver
Imagine a thousand mornings spent in conversation with the natural world. In simple lyricism, Mary Oliver invites us to observe the coastlines and marshland, invites us to ponder life.
Oliver wrote over 30 poetry collections during her lifetime. She won the Pulitzer for American Primitive in 1984. This chapbook is her later publication. It won the 2012 Goodreads Choice for Readers’ Favorite Poetry. And it won me over for the way it explores the simplicity of life.
All night my heart makes its way
however it can over the rough ground
of uncertainties, but only until night
meets and then is overwhelmed by
morning, the light deepening, the
wind easing and just waiting, as I
too wait (and when have I ever been
disappointed?) for redbird to sing.
(“A Thousand Mornings”)
Here, you find probing, uncertainty, contentment, sadness, grief, and happiness all stringed together in neat lines of verse, each stylistically different. Even the tension in each poem is handled gracefully, carefully. A conversational poetry collection, this poetry collection is accessible and transporting.
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