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Making Matters Verse: Poetry Gets A Look

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By KAREN HAYMON LONG

Published: December 2, 2007

Not long ago, a poet lamented to me that few newspapers review poetry books. So in honor of him and other poets, dead and alive, here's a look at some of the books of poems published this year.

"The Door," by Margaret Atwood (Houghton Mifflin, $25)

Better known for "The Handmaid's Tale" and other fiction, Atwood proves her diversity as a writer with this collection, her first book of poems since 1995.

She addresses all sorts of subjects in 50 pieces: a dead cat in the freezer, the smell of spilled gasoline, an old dollhouse filled with a miniature family she wonders about, another poet "ransacking his innards."

Graceful and sparse, her poems weave between the future and the past, sparkling with the same skill she brought to her novels.

"Ice Cream Melts," by Nnamdi Godson Osuagwu (Ice Cream Melts Publishing, $12.95)

The lines in Osuagwu's poems are rarely more than four words long, but they convey worlds of emotion. In one of the best, he traces his absent father's life: "like retracting expunged food through the digestive system, spitting out a perfectly made dinner which is then passed through the chef's skillet back into the store, loaded on the trucks, shipped to the farm and back into the earth ..."

His topics range all over the map: love, race, nagging, low self-esteem, musing about his mother's new man, shutting down emotions, electronic love.

"Failure," by Philip Schultz (Harcourt, $23)

At first glance, the poems in this book seem horribly sad and depressing. But keep reading, and you'll find other themes: his love for his sons, the wonders of the sea, the joy and comfort of a long, happy marriage.

Even "Failure," the poem that inspired the book's title, isn't as sad as it would seem. It tells of a man at the funeral of his father, who is referred to as a nobody:

"No, I said, he was a failure.

You can't remember

a nobody's name, that's why

they're called nobodies.

Failures are unforgettable."

Other new books of note:

Don't expect the excellent writing in Mark Levin's "Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover's Story of Joy and Anguish" (Pocket Books, $22) that you found in "Marley and Me," the runaway best seller by John Grogan.

Thankfully, Levin, a lawyer, didn't write his dog book in legalese. Instead, it reads like a how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation essay by a high school kid. But the sentiments and love are there.

Reading "The Tao of Emerson" (The Modern Library, $24.95), is like hearing an echo. On the left-hand pages are quotes from sixth century Chinese mystic Lao Tse. On the right are passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading light of the Transcendentalist Movement in the early 19th century.

They sound like they are channeling each other with sage thoughts on balance, peace, the evils of power and greed and the virtues of less government. They may have lived worlds apart and long ago, but their wisdom offers lessons for today.

Tribune book editor Karen Haymon Long can be reached at klong@tampatrib.com.

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