If a moral catastrophe and a sense of impending disorder have befallen our country, this moment differs from the modernist era, when some important writers found common ground with the fascism of the 1920s and 30s. In this season for giving thanks, it may be difficult to be thankful about anything. But, for me, it’s easy: I’m grateful for American poets.
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I can say that, for all our differences, not a single reputable poet in the United States has publicly espoused the odious algorithm of sentiments that make our civic prospects look bleak. Instead, poets have offered a reflection of present-day consciousness at its most urgent and luminous.
Thankful for the beautiful opportunity that I’ve had here at Literary Hub to present my understandings of the art, I offer some parting words of gratitude for the poetic experiences by which I’ll remember the otherwise portentous year of 2024.
I’ve gone back through the monthly reviews that my wonderful colleague Rebecca Morgan Frank and I wrote and selected a couple of favorite books for each month. Since we both previewed the entire year in January, I’ve selected four titles for that month. I hope you’ll click on the links and have a look back at the year in poetry with us:
January
Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma, V. Penelope Pelizzon’s A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye, Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry, Dawn Lundy Martin’s Instructions for the Lovers.
February
Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies, Tracy Fuad’s Portal.
March
Don Mee Choi’s Mirror Nation, Armen Davoudian’s The Palace of Forty Pillars.
April
Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World, Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles.
May
Catherine Barnett’s Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, Michael Goodfellow’s Folklore of Lunenburg County.
June
Chris Nealon’s All About You, Tayi Tibble’s Rangikura.
July
Christian Gullette’s Coachella Elegy, Zoë Hitzig’s Not Us Now.
August
Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North, Danez Smith’s Bluff.
September
Oliver Baez Bendorf’s Consider the Rooster, Louise Mathias’s What if the Invader Is Beautiful.
October
Jennifer Chang’s An Authentic Life, Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show.
November
Kimiko Hahn’s The Ghost Forest, Aditi Machado’s Material Witness.
And for December here are seven more books that embody what I’ll want to remember about 2024.
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Kwame Dawes, Sturge Town
Sturge Town bestows the continuing gift of Kwame Dawes’s extraordinary eloquence to recenter Anglophone poetry in a place of moral equipoise, the sonorous counter-song radiating from the post-slavery, postcolonial lands of the Caribbean and Africa.
Divided into sections each titled with phrases about light, this collection named after the poet’s family village, one of the first Jamaican towns created for freed slaves, contemplates the paradox of a worldly radiance enhanced with the darker shades of human meaning, “the white light that consumes / shadows, that turns this body / of riverbed brown into something / transparent like an ochre- /colored piece of cotton flapping / in the air.”
The voice exemplifies an ideal of gravitas, forthright and equitable in the deployment of its emphases, intimate yet crafted in the weight and swing of its cadences. “I am the author of my shame, / the wounded and the worried,” he writes, of the need for prayer, “and I close / my eyes to push away the darting lights / speeding toward my center.”
With the voice widening from his center to assume the music of others, a “Mammy,” a father, an alter ego named Robert Johnson, Dawes crosshatches the world in the illuminated shadows of Sturge Town, extending the ochre transparency of the Jamaican and Ghanaian landscapes of his past across the midwestern prairies and English cities of his present. “By three o’clock the walls are strained with shadows, / these colonial walls that we have kept, despite the revolution / and the new dialect of independence, kept for their history.”
Farnoosh Fathi, Granny Cloud
“Now this is an odd kind of writing,” writes Farnoosh Fathi, “mortified, spooked by a rose / soiled in fecal rhymes, on a chess-stained bluff / bluffing….” The power of surrealism lies not in its lack of referentiality but the opposite, the way in which its disjunctions renew the astonishment of the real. Nevertheless, quizzical readers may ponder what the non-referential work reminds them of in order to stabilize themselves with an anchor of literary reality.
Among Fathi’s pleasures are the way sound sometimes presides over sense, as in Edith Sitwell (“She wrote contra—country—clocking in”), or the way the self engages with its own otherness, as in Apollinaire (“If only I could unite myself with what I write”), or the way what Mina Loy called the “erotic garbage” of the world is summoned to untame the line (“So I misunderstood eros, and with that / myself. Porn upon thy impatience!”).
From John Ashbery, I trace the swerve from inventive distraction, attuned to the banal voices of the moment, to stark interceptions of eloquence, “something more interesting than speech in which you / believe yourself to be creating but rather moving only on.”
In Fathi’s case, an uproarious coprolalia and body-part infatuation intrude at choice moments: “Through gate strings of anal disco beads, / chase him on his anal pogo rainstick!”; “a nipple made entirely of cliffhangers”; “the leeside pubes, the pube-crossed dews”; a poem called “Rotpeter Report”; a thirty-page poem that turns on the word “fontanelle.” A unique sensibility, the comic counterpart to David Cronenberg’s body horror, forms from this motif, suggesting that what we may someday call the “Fathiesque” may reside in something irrepressibly corporeal and meaningfully inscrutable.
Halyna Kruk, Lost in Living (trans. Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky)
To read these pre-invasion poems by the Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk feels like an act of defiance against the war, now more important than ever. “We carry our dead like children,” she writes, “as if none of us yet knew / it was so easy to die.” If we cannot help but hear the sound of the future war in her words, her concerns here are “normally” existential—that is, without the threat of a fascist kleptocrat’s missile to destroy one’s actual existence.
The experience of the book is precisely to get lost in living, our mundane failures, our quandaries in romantic and familial love, our internalization of national history (“the company of the dead”), all the tangled, yearning life that Ukrainians should enjoy today and no longer can.
“Here it is, our golden silence,” Kruk’s speaker says to her son, “take as much as you want—with you I’m not stingy.” From the undeceived eyes of a mother, woman, citizen, and poet, she knows the limits of her prayers: “God, I want to give someone their rib back / but everyone has them.” Lost in Living is a bountiful vision of what an inner life would be like, smart, funny, melancholy, if left undefiled by the relentless destruction of one’s homeland.
Melissa Kwasny, The Cloud Path
Like the Proustian paths called Swann’s way and the Guermantes way, the ones that Melissa Kwasny follows in her seventh collection—cloud, aspen, prickly pear, melting ice—contain traceries of life choices and thematic reckonings of human ties. While Kwasny focuses on a beloved mother (“We are not born alone / but of mothers”), her paths suggest that nature is not merely a reflection of society but a medium that bestows vision and perspective. “Like any metaphor,” she writes, “the lupine path is a window, / not a mirror.”
Refusing to be “hopelessly diagnostic” of human frailties, she is “troubled by forces larger than me— / the wind, the rains, the sun,” often framing her humanistic concerns, like the violence of patriarchy (“I never worshiped the male gods”) and being forced into retirement by the pandemic, in terms of elemental forces, like the wind she hears when her mother’s voice “disappears.”
These searching meditations—sacral yet scientific, passionately metaphorical—show how the grandeur of nature inhabits all human questions. “Grief shoots through my body, / from my throat down to my feet,” she writes of her mother’s death. “But it is trees I want to write about, / their tangible fungal cords, how they can recognize their kin, / and help accordingly.”
Paul Muldoon, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore
Of those rare poets whose books outlast the tendency of criticism to domesticate their difficulty and strangeness, Muldoon is one such poet that I find myself turning to for something unexpected, the easefulness of his mind. He began as Seamus Heaney’s “rara avis,” an acclaimed wunderkind from County Armagh, and he has never entirely relinquished the precocious poet’s display of the recondite depth of his knowledge and the moiling music of his prosody.
As readers have journeyed with his work, these elements haven’t so much tamed themselves as recast the offhand pleasures that Muldoon offers so that what once seemed the province of strenuous hermeneutics now feels like joy in service on rue Muldoon. He writes, “The wheel invents the road. You made me what I am,” and with each book he invents his road and we make him what he is, choosing a path among high and low, song and reprise, disjunction and ludic arcana, until we stand on his “sandy hummock / that denotes where several narratives converge.”
This vista displays a fully self-aware yet devil-may-care convergence, an offhand offhand that intimates a post-post-modern, now shot through with intimations of mortality (an MRI, “my own dodgy ticker,” “another decade”). I won’t do what most critics do, which is to select a few random tidbits (e.g., Fulvia, Frankie Laine, the last wolf in Ulster, the Yandruwandha) to suggest his easy erudition.
The tidbits are far from easy, but they trace an easeful, elemental inevitability in Muldoon’s hands, not unlike the mortal grace of falling snow: “reminding us of what might disappear / night after night without leaving a trace.”
Laura Newbern, A Night in the Country
If the Nobel laureate Louise Glück was an exquisite model for the support of emerging poets, her selections of books—unlike Auden’s, for example—could sometimes suggest her own work in terms of form, referentiality, range of allusion, and tonality, such as a telltale dryness of affect, austere yet ironic. Laura Newbern’s second book, one of the last that Glück chose for publication, is clearly on the Glückian end of the stylistic continuum (“What was weeping, anyway, then? / A gesture, an illustration”), but it doesn’t feel like a case of undue influence.
Newbern arranges her poems about art and literature, from Dürer to Henry James, who “loved not the words, but what they conjured,” and about country life with the speaker’s family and friends in the South (“drinking from wineglasses there / in the mild wood”) with a limpid directness that is cool and restrained, all the better to exude the warmth of her insights, which can arrive with a pleasurable delay for readers schooled in more purplish, poetic emphases.
I advise reading the opening ekphrastic poem, “Madonna of the Meadow,” with Bellini’s image before you. Only then does the brilliant precision of the observations (the clouds “like smoke belched / from smokestacks,” or the look of the infant Jesus who sleeps “the sleep of an old man lost / at sea”) become movingly clear.
Newbern’s style permits the reader to arrive at something like epiphany by clearing away the usual markers of poetic ambition so that the emotion deepens retrospectively, as if our minds had become the cotton boll from the title poem: “a walnut, giving birth to a cloud.”
Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse
While “the death of poetry” reached an apex in the 1990s with a series of irritated responses to Joseph Epstein’s tendentious article “Who Killed Poetry?,” we could go back to Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues (1881), which defined poetry as “tout à fait inutile” and “passée de mode” (completely useless and out of fashion).
Ryan Ruby’s delightfully weird and bracingly ambitious first poetry book, Context Collapse, with the Poundian subtitle “a poem containing a history of poetry,” doesn’t so much denounce poetry as ignore it as irrelevant to his argument (quotations from theorists and scholars swamp those from poets), and he doesn’t proclaim its death so much as ascertain the death of any possibility of a culture that would create the circumstances for poetry’s continued persistence.
In loose blank verse and terza rima with facing footnotes also in blank verse (the footnotes even more pleasingly erudite than the meticulously constructed body of the poem), Ruby assembles strands from literary, cultural, and socioeconomic history to show how we arrived at the failures of “[t]he attention economies of our / era of information overload,” the inability of the culture to attend to anything, including poetry.
How does an art form survive if it is tethered, tenuously but ineluctably, to the “technologies of disseminating and storing information,” whether the vocal cords and memories of the Homeric aoidoi or the AI engines that are beginning to subsume the value of human creativity with machine-made facsimiles of poems?
Ironically, despite a dark, if not Schwarzschild-like, cultural cosmology and a sense from his emphases that he prefers thought to poetry itself, Ruby renews my faith in the importance of poetry. He’s one of those writers whose identity is clearly entangled in the pursuit of knowledge and whose underlying tone here—a relentless, somehow joyous anxiety—seems to arise from the futility of achieving the impossible goal of knowing everything, which may also be a manifestation of the fear of death.
This tonality aligns well with his belief that “the context of / Poetry is death.” To outline poetry’s anxious descent along a cognitive and cultural “circuit” from “the first hymn to the sun” to our post-literate, technocratic age is to delineate what is inherent in us as fallen, death-bounded beings.
One implication of Ruby’s book is that, if poetry dies, we would no longer be human. What lingers unanswered from Context Collapse is how we should respond: accept our fate with fatalism, fight it with more poems, or perhaps turn off our technology and open the Epic of Gilgamesh.
