I am a big fan of poetry anthologies. Maybe this makes me a lazy reader. Perhaps if I was a real poetry-lover, I would have read so widely that I would just know and recall the perfect poem to read when I feel feelings and want to read other people feel feelings on the printed page. Because that’s why I read poetry. I read fiction to escape but I read poetry to dwell. I like collected works of moody geniuses like Dylan Thomas and Anne Sexton. I feel as though they are flavors I indulge. I might wake up and feel like I need a Walt Whitman to get me going or a Frank O’Hara to cleanse the emotional palate. But I like anthologies, particularly the topically organized ones. Caroline Kennedy’s She Walks In Beauty is excellent (even though it is in the company of other hilariously gendered collections like The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men). I mostly share Kennedy’s taste in poets and, while I sort of totally doubt that they are all strictly Woman Poems, much of the material resonates with my own life experiences as, you guessed it, a woman. I like the ones I can flip to by theme.
And that’s why I picked up Good Poems for Hard Times. I was hesitant. I had an undeserved bias against Garrison Keillor because I have, at times, found his radio program seriously irritating. I have even said that I hated Garrison Keillor. I take it back. I’m really sorry, Garrison Keillor. It turns out that I was wrong about you. You sir…are a gentleman and a scholar and also a great curator of poems. It turns out that this is a skill for which you are actually known professionally. So this is my public apology to you for judging you based solely on some radio dramas you performed that I did not enjoy as a child.
I highly recommend this volume for your worst days, or your best…because the best day and the worst day probably aren’t that far apart except for the one to two terrible or wonderful things that happen to make a day what it is. I’m sharing a small excerpt from one poem in the book and maybe it will mean something to you the way it did to me when I read it tonight.
“[Wisdom] which also knows it magnifies the Lord,
defying the demon, being the only release,
oddly enough, from fear, being its own reward,
which is also wise, is faith, is hope, is peace,
is tender mercy, over and over again,
until, at last, is love, is love. Amen.”
- from “Job (Job 28:28)” by William Baer
