With Valentine's Day fast upon us, our thoughts naturally turn to love and marriage. So there may be no more obvious book of poems for this month than the posthumously published Poems of Love and Marriage by John Ciardi (University of Arkansas, $16).

Apart from that title, there is nothing obvious about the love poems Mr. Ciardi wrote to his wife, Judith. The verses are sometimes sweet (but never maudlin), always fresh, and often surprising, as the Columbia professor and former director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference moves us across the arc of their decades-long love affair.

Even more of a surprise was this past year's Acts of Love: Ancient Greek Poetry from Aphrodite's Garden (Modern Library, $13.95), selected and translated by George Economou. These translations are fearlessly modern, thoroughly grounded (as improbable as this sounds) in American idiom, and (as Billy Collins has written) "unabashed." If you like your Greeks straight, no chaser, you will cheer Mr. Economou's decision to rescue the ancients from euphemism and delicacy. This is Eros dressed in full metal jacket, aiming not only for the heart but the nether regions, as well.

Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky introduces his collection, The Handbook of Heartbreak (Rob Weisback Books, out of print but widely available on the Internet) with this puzzle: "Why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good?" It is the appeal of the blues, of every torch song ever written, and of the poems in this little anthology of 101 poems. The number was chosen by Mr. Pinsky because it sounded lonely to him. The poets represented include Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, Sherman Alexie and Mark Doty, not to mention Yeats, Bishop, Dickinson, Frost, Milton, Plath, Merrill, Blake, Heaney. It's a completely satisfying collection.

Mr. Pinsky's all-star lineup includes Jane Kenyon, who comprised, with her former teacher and husband, Donald Hall, one-half of one of the more durable poet-pairs of our time. Mr. Hall has written of their 23-year marriage and their 18-month battle against the leukemia that killed her in 1995 in The Best Day the Worst Day: Life With Jane Kenyon (Houghton Mifflin, $13.95, paper). Mr. Hall spares no detail and pulls no punches, and the result is a memoir that packs an incredible emotional wallop. It also provides tantalizing glimpses into the art and commerce of poetry as practiced by these two iconic figures of the past half-century.

Rounding out this year's list is Deborah Garrison's second volume of poems, The Second Child (Random House, $19.95), a completely worthy successor to her 1998 mega-hit, A Working Girl Can't Win (Random House, $7.95, paper). New Yorker editor and New Jersey wife and mother, Ms. Garrison writes poems that may be grounded in a particular time and place, but they are broadly appealing and totally convincing. In these two volumes about city life and office work, Ms. Garrison writes about her experiences as partner, spouse and parent in poems that are universal and instantly recognizable.

Tom Mayo teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at SMU's Dedman School of Law and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.