Newcomer Matt Donovan offers a remarkable collection of poems in Vellum, his first book and the winner of the 2006 Katherine Bakeless Prize for Poetry. Throughout the volume, Donovan writes about the master artists of the past, their working methods and materials from plaster to ink to paint comparing their crafts to his own. His poems are painterly and often catalogue images, as in A Partial Invocation of Our Days : And yet, let’s begin with macadam, fruit bowls, a Florentine mosaic / Louie Louie‘s three slurred chords . . . Since otherwise our days brim with dismantling, breakage, endless / riffs on the division into parts, I’ll invoke here only assemblage. Artists of all stripes Charlie Chaplin, Harry Houdini, Botticelli, Pablo Neruda make appearances in these poems, demonstrating the multiplicity of the creative act. Donovan’s broad range of reference and the visual nature of his verses gives this book a wonderful sense of scope and historical perspective. Donovan, it seems, is an artist in love with creation, a writer in love with life, and these rich, vivid poems prove it.

With A Worldly Country, revered writer John Ashbery offers his 26th book of verse. The Rochester, New York, native and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet turns 80 this year, and the pieces in this new volume find him in a phase of life in which looking back seems more disturbing than trying to puzzle out what’s to come. In Image Problem, he comes to grips with past perspectives: The solution may therefore be / to narrow the zone of reaction to a pinprick / and ignore what went on before, even when we called it life. Marked by flights of verbal fancy, Ashbery’s poems display an inquisitive yet reflective mindset. His delicately constructed lines contrast with the weight of his themes: age, mortality, the movement of the seasons, an awareness of his own precarious position in the universe. Reflected in the window / of a pharmacy, he writes in Litanies, you know the distance you’ve come. The precisely rhymed title piece reflects a hard-won wisdom on the part of the poet: So often it happens that the time we turn around in / soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in. / And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea / we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.

James Fenton has long been one of England’s most celebrated poets. His work prickly, spiny, short on sentiment features a bleak realism that’s balanced by a rapscallion sort of humor. His Selected Poems spans 30 years, providing a wonderful overview of his distinguished career.

Fenton, who is 58, got his start as a reporter in Southeast Asia an experience that informed his earliest poetry. Children in Exile focuses on a Cambodian family suffering from the displacement of war: I hear a child moan in the next room and I see / The nightmare spread like rain across his face / And his limbs twitch in some vestigial combat / In some remembered place. A haunting image like this one, couched in a quatrain, described in rhyme, is made all the more forceful by its formal setting. This use of traditional structures often heightens the irony of Fenton’s verse. God: A Poem is a classic example: I didn’t exist at Creation / I didn’t exist at the Flood / And I won’t be around for Salvation / To sort out the sheep from the cud Playful yet perverse, the lines are a crystalline representation of Fenton’s singular aesthetic.

Ancient Rome’s most illustrious poet, Publius Vergilius Maro (aka Virgil) lived from 70-19 B.C. During those five decades, much history was made: The senators assassinated Caesar; Cleopatra committed suicide; Octavian became emperor. The Aeneid, sparked by Octavian’s request for a narrative that would pay tribute to his government, occupied the last decade of Virgil’s life, and although he died before he could finish it, the poem was immediately appreciated as a work of genius. Robert Fagles’ new translation of The Aeneid is a fluid, lyrical rendering of the epic. One of the world’s leading classicists, whose versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey have sold more than a million copies, Fagles brings a contemporary vigor to Virgil’s lines. Despite the passage of centuries, Aeneas remains a compelling protagonist, noble yet flawed, and his adventures an affair with Queen Dido of Carthage, a journey through the Underworld, the founding of Imperial Rome make for rousing reading. Fagles’ lively, accessible translation includes a glossary and notes, which serve to put this seminal saga in context.

Literature lovers will be in raptures over Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), one of American’s most beloved authors. The new volume, assembled by Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker, collects for the first time fascinating archival material, giving readers access to lesser-known poems, poems in progress, and brief prose works. Ever-attentive to both nature and culture, Bishop was truly a cosmopolitan poet, and the selections reflect this, categorized as they are by locale: Brazil, Nova Scotia, New York. Overall, the works are formal and orderly, adhering to strict schemes of rhyme and meter, but they’re leavened by Bishop’s wit and her observant eye, which never fails to provide fresh perspectives. Sometimes you embolden, sometimes bore, she writes of the sea in Apartment in Leme. You smell of codfish and old rain. Homesick, the salt/weeps in the salt-cellars. The collection provides a wonderful glimpse into the origins of Bishop’s genius, and her personal evolution the movement from girlhood to womanhood, from the romantic to the ironic can be traced here. Bishop won every prize imaginable during her lifetime, from the Pulitzer Prize to the National Book Award, and with this new volume, it’s easy to see why.

The work of Franz Wright displays a different kind of craftsmanship. In God’s Silence the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer offers looser, more spacious poems with lines less closely knit, the absorption of them as natural as respiration for the reader. Marked by melancholy and a seemingly hard-won wisdom, the collection as a whole reflects the plight of an isolated soul at odds with the unseen.

In On the Bus, a poem at once nightmarish and lovely, a trip by public transportation brings to the poet’s mind a group execution, inspires diverting speculations/on the comparative benefits/of waiting in front of a ditch to be shot. Despite the sharing of a common, horrible fate, Wright imagines a lack of solidarity among the people involved. This tension between the opposing poles of isolation and communion is a recurring theme. For the poet, there is no co-existence, only existence: Nobody has called for some time./(I was always the death of the party.) he writes in Progress. Wright produces poems of unusual intimacy, and his humility, as evidenced in an urgent prose poem called From the Past, stays with the reader in the end: Who did I imagine I was, that things as they are, reality as God gave it, was not enough for me?

Best known for a pair of provocative memoirs, The Liar’s Club and Cherry, Mary Karr is also an acclaimed poet. A new collection called Sinners Welcome finds her coming to terms with her spiritual self, remembering lost friends and battling the empty-nest blues as her son leaves home for college. Karr is a master craftswoman, and her poems call attention to themselves through their very apparent artistry. She digs in deep to create tension a verbal reversal that’s unexpected, a phrase that astonishes, an image that startles. In Revelations in the Key of K, Karr describes how the alphabet has literally shaped her life: I came awake in kindergarten,/under the letter K chalked neat. . . And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid /names of my beloveds, sacred vows I’d break. A series of pieces re-envisioning famous religious tableaux (the Crucifixion, the Nativity, the Garden of Gethsemane) contains some of the collection’s most precise and sculpted poetry. Indeed, Karr’s own spiritual quest is the foundation of the book, which concludes with a wonderful essay called Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer.

<B>Spring into summer with Douglas Florian’s playful poems</B> Douglas Florian does it again. In his newest title, <B>Summersaults</B>, the award-winning children’s poet and illustrator brings together another perfect combination of verse and pictures. But children’s poetry? Who would’ve thunk it! Well, not Florian apparently. The former cartoonist whose work often appeared in <I>The New Yorker</I> magazine first launched into the children’s book scene with several nonfiction titles on careers. But something was missing. "I wanted to use more of my imagination," Florian says. One day at a flea market, he picked up a book of poems called <I>Oh, That’s Ridiculous</I>, edited by William Cole. Florian was so amused and inspired by the book that he decided to write some poems of his own and quickly realized his niche. "The poetry just seemed suited for my quirky nature," he says. And quirky it is. Since that fateful day, Florian’s whimsical imagination has produced such witty titles as <I>Bing Bang Boing, Laugh-eteria</I> and <I>Beast Feast</I>. His newest book, <B>Summersaults</B>, which includes such humorous verses as "Sidewalk Squawk" and "Dog Day," is a celebration of the season. The poems and pictures take the reader on a fantastic, fun-filled vacation. From "dande-lion" fields to cow pastures to "sidewalk hiking" to "The Sea," the book embraces all that summer has to offer. Florian’s creative style both in illustration and word usage catches the eye and hits the funny bone. Never a stickler for the rules of grammar, he uses words as he uses paints anyway he wants. Often treating the poems as pictures, he uses the formatting of the text to convey his message. So "The Swing" swings, the "Double Dutch Girls" skips, "Fireflies" flies, and "Summersaults" tumbles. How does he get away with such unconventional usages of words? Poetic license. "The sound of the word is what really matters," says Florian. "So I often switch things around and try to shake things up." Anything that enriches the word works for him. His goal is to have fun with the poetry and bring a sense of fun to his audience.

Where does the inspiration for these amusing musings come from? "Nature is an amazing endless variety of forms, structures and habitats," says Florian, who lives in New York City with his family. "The more you research the more inspiring it becomes." According to the author, <I>Beast Feast</I>, a 1994 ALA Notable Children’s Book, opened the floodgates to animals and nature for him. "As I would find out information about one animal, it would inspire me to write about another I had come across," says Florian. And the same goes for the seasons. While he was researching his first seasonal title, Winter Eyes, which won the 1999 <I>New York Times Book Review</I> Best Illustrated Books Award, Florian started thinking about all the marvelous things that summer has to offer. "I try to separate each topic in my head while I’m working on it, so that I can see it on it’s own terms," says Florian. "But once the inspiration is there, I can’t wait to get started on it." Florian, who grew up watching his father paint landscapes of the shores of Cape Cod and Long Island, credits his excitement for and love of nature to those early years. He gets back in touch with nature by reading Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau. "I have to activate the brain waves in order to work," he admits. As for the illustrations, he likes to mix those up and he admits that his creations are often accident or trial and error. "The way the human eye sees things and the camera picks them up are two very different things," says Florian. Creations that may look fabulous on paper end up looking less exciting in a book, so he plays around a bit. Florian has worked with such diverse media as brown bags with watercolor <I>(Beast Feast)</I>, crayon and off-white paper, and watercolor and colored pencils on vellum paper (as in <B>Summersaults</B>). "I liked the way the liquid sat on top of the paper," says Florian of his latest creation, "and I had a lot of fun doing the illustrations." Florian’s pictures and poems undoubtedly convey the fun he had writing <B>Summersaults</B>. But more importantly, his poems show readers that words do not have to be literal and mundane. They can be played with and adapted to whatever meanings we choose. "Poetry is not black and white," says Florian. "It is more like the gray and purple area that connects all the things we live in."

Often considered the most impracticable of art forms, poetry has been infused with a new purpose thanks to popular author and radio personality Garrison Keillor. He has long championed the genre on his NPR show The Writer’s Almanac, and Keillor now offers a new book, Good Poems for Hard Times, the follow-up to his 2002 anthology Good Poems in support of his belief that poetry is the ideal antidote for the everyday pressures and concerns that plague us all. The meaning of poetry is to give courage, he writes in the volume’s introduction. The intensity of poetry, its imaginative fervor, its cadences, is not meant for the triumphant executive, but for people in a jam you and me. Keillor himself picked the 185 pieces collected in the book, and his choices vary in period and category, displaying a wonderful range of voices and forms. Old favorites like Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost and William Shakespeare stand alongside newer writers, including Barbara Hamby and R.S. Gwynn. There are poems on family and work, aging and love and simple day-to-day survival, poems to provide joy, inspiration and optimism, to combat sorrow, loneliness and loss. Poets can make a feast out of trouble, /Raising flowers in a bed of drunkenness, divorce, despair, R. J. Ellmann writes in To A Frustrated Poet, and Keillor’s collection supports his statement. Whatever your situation or particular set of cares, Good Poems for Hard Times contains the perfect cure.

Julie Hale keeps her old copies of The New Yorker in Austin, Texas.

<B>Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry</B> For those of us who write poetry, this time of year is always occasion to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s dictum that "April is the cruelest month." For the past decade or so, April has become even crueler paradoxically enough because of the Academy of American Poets’ proclamation of it as National Poetry Month.

While the brief and slightly heightened attention paid to poetry during these 30 days is, of course, welcome, it also serves to remind us of the diminishment of poetry in our time. Just as we need Black History Month or National Women’s History Month to remind us of the historical invisibility of particular populations, we apparently require a special month for poetry. Or perhaps the situation is more dire than that. Could it be that National Poetry Month is as necessary National Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a kind of public service attempt to decrease a high mortality rate? However we may view the privileging of the form during the month of April, it is always a relief to come upon truly excellent and profoundly readable volumes of poetry that offer the promise of winning audiences back to the genre. Here are three.

In <!–BPLINK=0618152857–><B>Song ∧ Dance</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Houghton Mifflin, $22, 80 pages, ISBN 0618152857), Alan Shapiro continues the beautifully agonizing chronicle of the demise of his family. Earlier works have addressed the death of his sister from cancer and the aging of his parents. <I>"Did you ever have a family?"</I> he asks himself in the title poem. This new volume takes as its subject the struggle of the poet’s brother, David Shapiro, with an incurable brain cancer. It is almost unbelievable that any one family should have suffered from terminal illness to the extent that Shapiro’s has. And yet, Shapiro’s real contribution lies in showing us how ordinary his family’s suffering ultimately is. His poems impress upon us his vision of the great, ongoing human misery, and how that misery can be balanced out by the loving and loyal attentiveness of family and friends who stay the course. In the inventive, well-wrought forms of these poems, Shapiro reveals the company and solace that can be offered the dying and the bereaved. "By god it’s summer and/you’ve cleared the bases," he says in "Up Against." "There’s no one out./The inning could go on forever." With the testimony of poems like these, the author’s brother is sure to "go on forever," and in that way no one shall ever lose him.

Charles Wright’s new volume, <!–BPLINK=0374263027–><B>A Short History of the Shadow</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Farrar, Straus, $20, 96 pages, ISBN 0374263027), gives us his familiar, laconically philosophical voice and the long, limpid lines for which he has become famous. Though Wright is known for his elegant ruminations on nostalgia and the mysterious passing of time, this volume, with its plethora of seasonal allusions and insistent referencing of times and images past, has an even more elegiac cast than his earlier work. Perhaps it is the titling of one section, "Millennium blues" or even our realization of the poet’s age (67 this year), that makes these poems sound almost like a last will and testament. "I think of nightfall all the time," he says in one poem. This is a hauntingly lovely volume of mature ruminations on memory, aging and the inevitable, but not unfriendly, approach of death by a poet who has lived richly, courageously and with profound dedication to the unsentimental practice of his art. In her six volumes of poetry, Linda Bierds has revealed herself as one of the most imaginatively interesting of the mid-generation of American poets. Her most recent book, <B>The Seconds</B>, gives us more examples of her sure hand with imagery and the delicate voicing she brings to narrative. Here, the poems often originate in a painting or in the details of an artist’s or a writer’s life Vermeer, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Zelda Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka and they are alive with the narrative imagery that Beirds is so good at evoking. This is a book for readers who love to lose themselves in the minutiae of poems constructed around a substantial thematic core. Decorative and detailed, Bierds’ poems do not stop there, but address themselves to subjects that resonate with the realities of contemporary readers’ lives. <I>Kate Daniels is a poet who teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.</I>

<B>Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry</B> For those of us who write poetry, this time of year is always occasion to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s dictum that "April is the cruelest month." For the past decade or so, April has become even crueler paradoxically enough because of the Academy of American Poets’ proclamation of it as National Poetry Month.

While the brief and slightly heightened attention paid to poetry during these 30 days is, of course, welcome, it also serves to remind us of the diminishment of poetry in our time. Just as we need Black History Month or National Women’s History Month to remind us of the historical invisibility of particular populations, we apparently require a special month for poetry. Or perhaps the situation is more dire than that. Could it be that National Poetry Month is as necessary National Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a kind of public service attempt to decrease a high mortality rate? However we may view the privileging of the form during the month of April, it is always a relief to come upon truly excellent and profoundly readable volumes of poetry that offer the promise of winning audiences back to the genre. Here are three.

In <!–BPLINK=0618152857–><B>Song ∧ Dance</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Houghton Mifflin, $22, 80 pages, ISBN 0618152857), Alan Shapiro continues the beautifully agonizing chronicle of the demise of his family. Earlier works have addressed the death of his sister from cancer and the aging of his parents. <I>"Did you ever have a family?"</I> he asks himself in the title poem. This new volume takes as its subject the struggle of the poet’s brother, David Shapiro, with an incurable brain cancer. It is almost unbelievable that any one family should have suffered from terminal illness to the extent that Shapiro’s has. And yet, Shapiro’s real contribution lies in showing us how ordinary his family’s suffering ultimately is. His poems impress upon us his vision of the great, ongoing human misery, and how that misery can be balanced out by the loving and loyal attentiveness of family and friends who stay the course. In the inventive, well-wrought forms of these poems, Shapiro reveals the company and solace that can be offered the dying and the bereaved. "By god it’s summer and/you’ve cleared the bases," he says in "Up Against." "There’s no one out./The inning could go on forever." With the testimony of poems like these, the author’s brother is sure to "go on forever," and in that way no one shall ever lose him.

Charles Wright’s new volume, <B>A Short History of the Shadow</B>, gives us his familiar, laconically philosophical voice and the long, limpid lines for which he has become famous. Though Wright is known for his elegant ruminations on nostalgia and the mysterious passing of time, this volume, with its plethora of seasonal allusions and insistent referencing of times and images past, has an even more elegiac cast than his earlier work. Perhaps it is the titling of one section, "Millennium blues" or even our realization of the poet’s age (67 this year), that makes these poems sound almost like a last will and testament. "I think of nightfall all the time," he says in one poem. This is a hauntingly lovely volume of mature ruminations on memory, aging and the inevitable, but not unfriendly, approach of death by a poet who has lived richly, courageously and with profound dedication to the unsentimental practice of his art. In her six volumes of poetry, Linda Bierds has revealed herself as one of the most imaginatively interesting of the mid-generation of American poets. Her most recent book, <!–BPLINK=0399147861–><B>The Seconds</B><!–ENDBPLINK–> (Putnam, $24, 88 pages, ISBN 0399147861), gives us more examples of her sure hand with imagery and the delicate voicing she brings to narrative. Here, the poems often originate in a painting or in the details of an artist’s or a writer’s life Vermeer, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Zelda Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka and they are alive with the narrative imagery that Beirds is so good at evoking. This is a book for readers who love to lose themselves in the minutiae of poems constructed around a substantial thematic core. Decorative and detailed, Bierds’ poems do not stop there, but address themselves to subjects that resonate with the realities of contemporary readers’ lives. <I>Kate Daniels is a poet who teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.</I>