With National Poetry Month comes spring flowers and some of the year's biggest poetry publications. And as April wraps up, we wanted to bring you two of our favorites — retrospective collections from two of the best poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Marie Howe and Jean Valentine. Howe's New and Selected Poems makes a concise case for Howe's status as an essential poet.
The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine gathers all of the beloved late poet's work, a monument to a treasured career. Marie Howe is writing some of the most devastating and devastatingly true poems of her career — and some of the best being written by anyone. Her subject matter, from a bird's eye, is simply the big questions and their non-answers: What are we here for? What does it mean to do good? What have we done to the environment? What are the consequences and what do we who are here now owe to those who will follow us? And yet her tone and straightforward delivery make her poems as approachable as friends.
Howe is the rare poet whose poems one wants to hug closely for company, companionship, and empathy; and yet they are works of literature of the highest order, layered, full of booby traps and shoots and ladders that suddenly transport one between the words. It's tough love that these poems offer, but it's undeniably love. This first retrospective gathers a book's worth of new poems along with ample selections from of Howe's four previous collections, each of which was a landmark .
