McNally Robinson NYC

by Sylvia Plath
(Harper Collins, $12.00)
Every poem in this book makes me feel like the top of my head is going to come off. No matter how often I read it. A burning, burning book..

Translated by A.C. Graham
(Random House, $14.95)
It’s a measure of how crass my tastes have grown, perhaps, that the natural imagery in these poems, the persistent arch detail, is less surprising than how very personal they can be. They discuss lechery, decrepitude, helplessness, doubt, and, above all, poetry itself. At their most casual these poets sound strikingly like mid-century American writers; at their most formal they have no peers..

by Tracy K. Smith
(Holtzbrink, $14.00)
It is difficult to translate the Spanish word duende, but “inner spirit”, and “mojo” come close. Federico Garcia Lorca famously discussed it, and here, Smith crafts poems that speak to spiritual lives that are sad, yet always in motion–a Native American tossed into foster homes, a lover questioning the temper of a lost marriage, an Andalusian dog’s survival–and, in so doing, captures the indecipherable mystery of souls..

by Frank O’Hara
(Small Press Distribution, $10.00)
O’Hara, it seems, was a master of the modern love poem. These works are elegiac in small ways, full of complaint and allusion and plain speech made sharp. They are the romantic tailings of an incareful honesty. This slim collection of three chapbooks is an excellent way to get a taste of O’Hara’s amazing range and disarmingly casual voice, either as a companion to his Lunch Poems or alone..

Translated by Paul Schmidt
(New York Review of Books, $14.95)
Is it more telling of my tastes, or of the lasting worth of the poetry contained, that I prefer this new collection from pre-revolution Moscow to many more recent anthologies? From Mandelstam’s prefiguring of the mid-century American voice to Akhmatova’s bold lyricism and Khlebnikov’s resolute Modernism, this slim book highlights the wealth of talent that had arisen in late-tsarist Russia. Try to read them without letting foreknowledge spoil your palate too much..

by Wiszlaw Szymborska
(W. W. Norton, $15.95)
Szymborska (pronounced zim-BOAR-ska) is one of the fierce old ladies of poetry, hauling her passion and idealism through a lifetime of being taught that she ought to know better. In her case, the emotional heft is filtered through an extra layer of translation from the Polish, and all her country’s struggle to reconcile its ideals with the horrors of history. But her stone-faced lines can’t hide a massive sense of humor about the whole human project, and an ongoing love for all of it. Let her surprise you, image by image — you’ll close this collection with a sense of the miraculous, there for the taking..

by Paul Celan
(W. W. Norton, $17.95)
The single greatest poet to emerge from postwar Germany’s “culture of silence”, Celan is himself a master of framing and the blank page. More than simple elision, however, Celan’s silences are the still pool of memory upon which his words, all foliage and metonymy, are buoyed up. A wondrous voice..

By John Berryman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $18.00)
Despair young poets. Any voice you’ve learned, every thought you’ve wanted to set to paper, Berryman has already explored it with more roughness and grace than any but the greatest of us can hope to imitate.