Summertime Poetry Picks
S.B. Poet Laureate David Starkey Gives Us His Must-Read Collections
Sunday, June 28, 2009
By David Starkey, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate
Whether you’re new to poetry or you’re a lifelong appreciator of the form, it’s worth reading the best of the best. Here are some highlights from the past few years-poems to savor this summer, whether on the beach at night alone, or sitting on some bank beside a river clear.
1) Ruth Stone’s What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems: What Love Comes To was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, but to my mind is the best book of poetry published in 2008. Stone’s poems are concise and approachable, yet her imagery and figurative language are nearly always oddly arresting. Consider these four similes describing poetry: “Like comb jelly / like canned condensed air / like the full sac of the cobra / the bitter milk of the tongue.”
2) Todd Boss’s Yellowrocket: Formally speaking, Todd Boss’s most obvious poetic forebear is Gwendolyn Brooks. Like Brooks, he employs frequent yet irregular rhyming and heavy doses of alliteration and assonance, which result in poems that sing from line to line and are a real pleasure to read aloud. Like Billy Collins, Boss is a witty and accessible celebrant of everyday joys and “the lapidary / who cuts our days / like diamonds / from the carbon cold above.”