This year marks the sixth anniversary of National Poetry Month, a four-week literary celebration sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. With readings, book fairs and festivals nationwide, the month provides a variety of ways to celebrate this classic genre of literature. If you prefer to markthe occasion by reading selections from some of the best contemporary poets, several exciting new volumes offer a wide range of choices.

Those who have read Julianna Baggott's wisecracking, quirky debut novel Girl Talk may be surprised to learn that Baggott is also a poet. Though more melancholy than Baggott's darkly comic fiction, the poems in her first collection This Country of Mothers wrestle with the same themes and ideas as Girl Talk. Like the novel, the collection is narrated by a young American Everywoman, navigating her way through a generic and often cruel landscape. As one might expect from an author who spent years writing fiction before turning to poetry, these are narrative poems, all of which deal with the same set of lively characters: the narrator; her tidy mother (who, in one poem, becomes the matriarch of a brood of bears); her one-legged maternal grandfather (whose hairless and pink prosthetic leg terrorizes the narrator); and her small daughter (on the verge of sight, just discovering a sense of herself in the world).

The narrator strives to reconcile her growing spirituality with her intense skepticism, "to figure out how to live in this sooty Eden, in which [l]ove makes us capable of the ugliest sins," through her interactions with these characters. Written in a kind of lyrical vernacular with line breaks that imitate natural speech patterns, these compelling, breathless poems read almost like a novel or a set of linked stories, as the narrator engages with the literal and metaphysical worlds. In "Correcting Memory," an early poem, she petulantly insists, "I don't want to know." By the end she coolly asks, "What could lie beyond these gates?"

Like Baggott, Thomas Lux inspects the grotesqueries of everyday American life and situates his poems in a kind of blank American panorama. "[T]he aesthetics/of landscape/less important than the fear for our lives," says the narrator of "So We Can See the Snakes Coming," describing his approach to lawn care and, in a way, encapsulating Lux's own approach to the physical world. Although many of the poems in The Street of Clocks, Lux's eighth collection, engage with natural or domestic environments, they do so only in order to get at the gristly stuff underneath. Death or the fear for our lives is ever-present and regarded with a sly mixture of adult apprehension and childish glee. "In the Bedroom Above the Embalming Room," for example, chronicles a child's discovery that his neighbor, the local undertaker, lives a humdrum life despite his profession thus, death is revealed as banal, part of daily existence.

Lux revels in language, and the compressed poems in The Street of Clocks are rich with puns, internal rhyme, repetition and onomatopoeia all of which lend a fluidity to his clipped lines and often formal diction. This is verse that transforms the world around us into a vista both menacing and comic.

Two vividly imagined dramas comprise Brutal Imagination, Cornelius Eady's aptly titled sixth collection. The first section is a series of poems based on the Susan Smith murder case, in which Smith murdered her two small sons, then claimed that a black man had kidnapped them. Eady, for the most part, writes in the voice of the imaginary kidnapper, using the details of the case to investigate the way the black man lives in the white imagination. "Susan Smith willed me alive/At the moment/Her babies sank into the lake/When called, I come," he explains in "How I Got Born," the collection's opening poem. In "Press Conference" and "Sympathy"–poems that detail Smith's confession–he constructs the imaginary kidnapper and Smith as one being, intrinsically tied: "How do we feel?" he asks, answering, "we're hard to untangle." Thus, Eady lays bare our most pernicious cultural myths and biases; the idea of the black man as criminal is nothing without the white woman's projection of this idea onto him. The cycle's final poem, "Birthing," describes the difficulty of breaking free from such stereotypes. "I am not me, yet," says Eady's protagonist, "I am just an understanding."

Poems that Eady adapted into a Pulitzer-nominated libretto for composer Deidre Murray comprise the second section, The Running Man Poems. These form a loose narrative about the death of a character called "Running Man." The poems narrated by Running Man's mother, father, sisters and Running Man himself (as a ghost) mainly consist of the family members' reactions to his death, as well as Running Man's own poignant commentary on his life. Where I come from, he declares in the section's titular poem, A smart black boy/Is like being a cat with a duck's bill. One can't help but think while reading Brutal Imagination that Eady's spare, intelligent verse will make such statements obsolete.

One of the major literary events of the year is the publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, an extraordinary portrait of his marriage to poet Sylvia Plath through 88 chronologically arranged poems to her. Hughes, since 1987 Great Britain's Poet Laureate, was married to Plath from 1956 until she committed suicide in 1963. The Bell Jar, as well as the posthumous publication of Ariel, brought her work worldwide recognition and acclaim. Hughes's reluctance to publically address Plath's death and his realtionship with her has been viewed by some as reprehensible. Their marrige has for years been the subject of intense scrutiny and has contributed in part to the mythology surrounding Plath.

Now, with Birthday Letters, the world is finally hearing Hughes's response. His tender, despairing poems make his grief evident and show a couple deeply committed to their work. "And we/Only did what poetry told us to do." But Plath was often troubled. "You were like a religious fanatic/Without a god unable to pray./You wanted to be a writer./Wanted to write?/What was it within you/Had to have its tale? . . . You bowed at your desk and you wept/Over the story that refused to exist."

Hughes acknowledges that Plath's troubles began before their life together, but does partially accept responsibility. He shows his failure to understand. "At that time/I had not understood/How the death hurtling to and fro/Inside your head, had to alight somewhere/And again somewhere, and had to be kept moving,/And had to be rested/Temporarily somewhere." In images tender and frightening, sometimes searing and powerful, we gain a sense of two creative people caught up in something they could not control. "You were a jailer of your murderer /Which imprisoned you./And since I was your nurse and protector/Your sentence was mine too."

This is only one side of the story. The reader may or may not accept it as the truth. As poetry, however, and as at least a partial truth, it succeeds magnificently.

Diane Ackerman is one of our finest writers about nature and the senses, the author of the bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, as well as A Natural History of Love, and The Rarest of the Rare, about endangered animals. She is also a prize-winning poet. Her long-awaited new collection, I Praise My Destroyer, has just been published. She explores nature and science with awe and praise but is always aware of the human dimension. In the title poem she writes: "Our cavernous brains/won't save us in the end,/though, heaven knows, they enhance the drama," and "it was grace to live/among the fruits of summer, to love by design,/and walk the startling Earth/for what seemed/an endless resurrection of days." In "We Die," her poem for Carl Sagan, and "Elegy," for John Condry, she speaks of the pain of loss, the reality of mortality. But she conveys joy and sensuousness in such poems as "The Consolation of Apricots." These poems are rich and intense.

In her acceptance speech upon receiving the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska said: "Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating, 'I don't know.' Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift, absolutely inadequate. So poets keep on trying . . ." Szymborska's work always questions searching for a different way to perceive things, another way to understand better what our lives are all about. She does this with an economy of language that is at once intelligent, philosophical, witty, yet always in touch with the real world. A major publishing event this month is her Poems New and Collected 1957-1997. This volume contains virtually all of her poetry to date, including all 100 poems from her popular collection A View with a Grain of Sand. An additional feature is the text of her Nobel lecture.

Szymborska reminds us: "After every war/someone has to tidy up./Things won't pick/themselves up, after all." And that "Reality demands/that we also mention this:/Life goes on./It continues at Cannae and Borodino,/at Kosovo Polje and Guernica." She notes: "We're extremely fortunate/not to know precisely/the kind of world we live in." In "The Century's Decline," she writes: "'How should we live?' someone asked me in a letter./I had meant to ask him/the same question./Again, and as ever,/as may be seen above,/the most pressing questions/are naive ones."

Three years ago poet Jane Kenyon died after a 15-month struggle with leukemia. Her husband, Donald Hall, himself the author of 13 volumes of verse, offers very personal poetry about her life and death, and life for him after her death, in Without. After reading these poems we feel that we know these people and have shared a range of experiences with them. Although this collection conveys sadness and agony and loss, there exists also courage and strength in these poems.