GREAT POETRY COLLECTIONS

From grandparents to grandchildren the poetry collections below have given my family the gift of gratitude. Clicking on the title will take you to it's location on the Amazon website.
 
THIRST by Mary Oliver 
National treasure Mary Oliver, in a book as fierce in love as it is numinous with understandings of God and wilderness, gives us Thirst.  The poems in this collection celebrate the life and death of Oliver’s beloved partner of over 40 years, Molly Malone Cooke.  Oliver’s art, sharp and expansive, is stunning, brilliant, and made of adoration. 

MASTODON 80% COMPLETE by Jonathan Johnson 
In poems that contain doors to the transcendent in people and nature, Johnson creates a sense of illumination and quiet fearlessness that approaches death and does not shudder.  His love for relationship, for wilderness, and for an abiding respect inherent to all that lives and moves is an effervescent outpouring, and the transport he evokes can bring the reader from despair to the threshold of discovery.  A powerful and luminous voice, his second book of poems, In the Land We Imagined Ourselves, is currently in press.

THE SUMMER OF BLACK WIDOWS by Sherman Alexie 
Sherman Alexie, a poet whose work is inscribed with joy, sacredness, laughter, and tears, issues in The Summer of Black Widows a vivid song of vicious and systemic harm, rageful lament, and finally the hearty buoyancy of creatively encountering the world.   Face to face, skin to skin, Alexie’s profound sense of tenderness gives weight and authority to the justice he speaks.  An original voice, he gifts American life with a touch that heals blindness.  Winner of the PEN/Hemingway award for his fiction, A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, and a multi-year winner of the World Heavyweight Poetry Bout, Alexie is known to have read at age 3 and devoured Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath at the age of 5. 

LIGHT’S LADDER by Christopher Howell 
Winner of the Washington State Book Award, Light’s Ladder reveals beneath the surface of the collective dream of family and serenity, the nearly un-nameable grief of losing a child to early death.  In this his eighth collection, Christopher Howell’s poems move with the rhythms of a soulful blues elegy whose artistic engine is precise and worshipful, and graced by a love that faces the unknowable with humble brokenness and enduring hope.  Seamless, imbued with fire, Light’s Ladder is a gift of understanding, even joy, in the midst of unrelenting sorrow. 

THE FATHER by Sharon Olds 
Excruciating in their revelations, potent with revolution, Sharon Olds’ poems approach the dominance of father over daughter with shocking force, raw intimacy, and ultimately grace.  The reverberant layering of the collection’s structure generates an irresistible pull into the core of self and family, from which Olds helps the reader emerge able to engage with greater transparency, and love with unlimited will.   

THISTLE by Melissa Kwasny 
In this collection of odes to the temperament and individualized character of weeds, flowers, herbs, and trees, Kwasny tills the terrain of human emotion and reveals with freshness and grit the bloom of discernment and hope.  

THE GREAT FIRES by Jack Gilbert 
A poet acquainted with death and undoing, Gilbert gives us both sensitivity and ferocity in his concrete engagement with the fears that inhabit the walls of our lives.  Fiercely compassionate, giving, and humble, Gilbert’s art awakens and revives.