Julie Hale

There’s more wildness in store for fans of Maurice Sendak. Before his death in May 2012, the master storyteller completed one last book, a magical tribute to his late brother, Jack, and his longtime partner, Eugene Glynn, that, with its questing hero, surreal plotline and fluid imagery, neatly encapsulates the work of his 60-year career.

At once bold and tender, cosmic and intimate, My Brother’s Book is a mind-blower of a poem—a tale of brotherly love that unfolds on a mythical scale and bears traces of Shakespeare and Blake.

The book opens with a catastrophe. When a star slams into the Earth, siblings Jack and Guy are instantly lost to each other. Jack is cast into a frozen landscape, where he’s encased in ice, “a snow image stuck fast,” while Guy is hurled into the sky, “a crescent . . . passing worlds at every plunge.” Guy makes an unfortunate landing—in the paws of a giant polar bear, who is uninterested in the riddle Guy puts to him concerning Jack’s unhappy fate. With little ado, the bear devours his catch, and thus begins Guy’s final journey, “diving through time so vast—sweeping past paradise,” to a lush underworld where he reunites with Jack.

At least, that’s one interpretation of My Brother’s Book. Open-ended and ethereal, it’s an odd little narrative, even by Sendakian standards. Its illustrations, so beautifully fluid and yet precise, teem with the effects of nature—the details of a metamorphic landscape taken over by trees and vines, boulders and roots, icicles and cinders. The sky is an extra, palpable presence in many of the pictures. Thanks to the galactic details Sendak added—drifting stars, smoky clouds, oversized moons—you can practically feel the pull of the planets.

As scholar Stephen Greenblatt writes in the book’s foreword, Sendak found themes for his final work in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a play about separation and reunion.

Sendak, who won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 for Where the Wild Things Are and wrote and illustrated dozens of other children’s books, credited Jack,also a children’s author, for inspiring his passion for writing and art. My Brother’s Book is also regarded as an elegy for Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst and Sendak’s partner for 50 years before Glynn’s death in 2007.

This elusive coda, inspired by cycles of love and loss, serves as the ultimate salutation to the ties that bind.

That Little Something, the 18th collection from U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic, is a volume of brief, informal poems that feel effortlessly composed and poignantly chronicle the loneliness of the human condition. Simic's poems are populated by observers and outsiders – solitary figures who are ill at ease in the world. In melancholy portraits of isolation like "Walking" and "Dramatic Evenings," a sense of disconnection is coldly palpable. The narrator of "Summer Dawn" is rootless and alone, prepared "To slip away on foot . . . to look for another refuge." Simic is a master of the mental picture – in a couple of words, he can complete a portrait. The noir-ish "Night Clerk in a Roach Motel" is full of suggestive images that are simple yet unsettling. The narrator, "the furtive inspector of dimly lit corridors," wonders to himself, "Is that the sound of a maid making a bed at midnight? / The rustling of counterfeit bills being counted in the wedding suite? / A fine-tooth comb passing through a head of gray hair?" Clean, uncluttered, almost conversational, Simic's poems examine solitude from every angle, yet they don't leave the reader feeling cold. Simic has his own brand of pleasant pessimism. It's a bleakness leavened with ironic humor, and it gives his work an extra edge, as evidenced in "Madmen Are Running the World": "Watch it spin like a wheel," Simic writes, "and get stuck in the mud."

Lost moments

With Old War, award-winning poet Alan Shapiro offers a beautifully crafted collection dealing with the passage of time, the threat of mortality and the fragility of joy. The narrator of many of these poems is the jealous guard of a precarious peace, all too aware of the fleeting nature of contentment, desperate to hold on to the here and now. In poems like "Last Wedding Attended by the Gods" and "Bower" – both filled with lush imagery yet tinged with bittersweet sadness – happiness exists outside of reality and is all too easily shattered. "Old War," another homage to the lost moment, is a wistful, questioning work in which the poet tries to regain what's gone: "Where is the bower? / And where is it now? / And how do I get back?" Shapiro writes from a variety of perspectives in this formally diverse collection. Persona-based poems like "Skateboarder" and "Runner" showcase his ability to transform commonplace occurrences into remarkable experiences. The perfectly controlled "Country-Western Singer" couples lowbrow subject matter with a traditional rhyme scheme, but the results are unexpectedly profound. After years of drink, the singer has reached the end of the line: "And the blood I taste, the blood I swallow / Is as far away from wine / As 5:10 is for the one who dies / At 5:09." Perfectly shaped, written without excess, Shapiro's poems are first-class.

A simpler past

Showcasing her breadth of vision and mastery of form, Mary Jo Salter's A Phone Call to the Future features new work, as well as excerpts from previous volumes. The book spans nearly a quarter of a century and provides a rich sampling of Salter's eloquent, elegantly composed poems. In the visionary title work, Salter contrasts our technologically advanced era with the less complicated decades that came before, revealing a past that appears unreal: "Who says science fiction / is only set in the future? / After a while, the story that looks least / believable is the past. / The console television with three channels. / Black-and-white picture. Manual controls." Marked by a very conscious sense of craft, Salter's work is precise and artful, composed with a decided sensitivity toward formal poetic tradition. Injecting routine moments of existence with a special luminescence, she writes about the mother-daughter bond ("Dead Letters"), the habits of marriage ("Aubade for Brad") and the process of aging ("Somebody Else's Baby"). There are no extraordinary events here, just the business of day-to-day living, with its little highs and lows, recounted in poems that are deeply human, brilliantly realized and refreshingly perceptive.

Edward Hirsch began contributing his Poet's Choice column to The Washington Post Book World not long after 9/11, and the weekly feature immediately struck a chord with readers. His new book, Poet's Choice, is a collection of those columns that covers the work of more than 130 poets from different eras and countries. Writing with a gentle touch about a formidable genre, Hirsch invites readers to further explore the work of Vietnam War poets, Asian-American women poets, contemporary Mexican poets and Scottish poets. He also dissects individual works, taking them apart so readers can see how they function. Reviewing new poetry collections from modern authors like Stuart Dischell, Deborah Digges and Bill Knott, he provides ample historical context for their work. A wonderfully accessible book, Poet's Choice is divided into two parts: the first focuses on international writers, while the second looks at American authors. There's plenty of new material in the volume, as Hirsch has revisited and expanded many of his original columns. An acclaimed poet in his own right, Hirsch is the author of six verse collections, as well as the best-selling book How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. With Poet's Choice, he offers a delightful tutorial in both classic and contemporary verse.