04/19/98

By Tom Mayo / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

National Poetry Month is upon us, courtesy of the Academy of American Poets, and the promotional efforts of publishers, booksellers,schools - even the premillennial White House - are again in high gear. If we didn't know better, we might well believe that bookstores are having a hard time keeping poetry volumes on their shelves and that poets occupy a special place in the hearts of our leaders.

Yet, despite poetry's well-deserved reputation as the publishing world's poor relation, it is gaining ground as a public art form and a private passion. Some of the credit for this is undoubtedly due to our three most recent national poet laureates, who have traveled and lectured tirelessly to popularize the art. Laureate Robert Pinsky and his immediate predecessors, Robert Hass and Rita Dove, will be doing just that when they conduct a reading next Wednesday at the White House's Third Millennium (the event will be simulcast on the White House and Sun Microsystems Web sites).

Mr. Hass' efforts during his tenure as laureate included writing a weekly column for The Washington Post that is now in its third year. The columns usually consist of a single poem with a brief note about the author or what it was in the poem that caught Mr. Hass' eye and ear. Most poems are connected to the seasons, holidays, public events, the death of a favorite poet, or (three weeks out of every four) the appearance of a new book that Mr. Hass particularly likes. His tone is consistently helpful and encouraging. He is particularly good on technical matters, but he tends to keep the analysis light. And Mr. Hass has the refreshing habit of readily confessing his own mystification over certain lines, sometimes offering a guess but more often simply luxuriating in the ambiguity of his selection.

Mr. Hass has now published the first two years of these columns in book form (Poet's Choice: Poems for Everyday Life, Ecco Press, $23). There are 104 essays here, making up an eclectic anthology of mostly modern and mostly American poetry. Many of our best-known poets are included, alongside first-timers and poets from around the world. Poet's Choice is also a kind of chapbook, with poems set down in the midst of Mr. Hass' memories, travel notes and musings. Mr. Hass' fans may find it difficult to re-create the fun of reading the columns each week once they have been collected between two covers, but the excitement of discovering new voices and encountering familiar ones, and the sheer joy of reading the poems themselves, are there on every page.

In the past month alone, three anthologies have come out that also deserve attention.

* The most astonishing is World Poetry, edited by Katharine Washburn and John Major (W.W. Norton, $45). A successor to Mark Van Doren's 1928 collection, this behemoth (1,338 pages) covers every epoch (beginning with the Bronze and Iron Ages) and culture. Eighty percent of the works are translations, and apparently the editors tried to use the work of accomplished poets whenever possible. They have included Percy Shelley's Dante and Ted Hughes' Seneca, for example, as well as renderings by Adrienne Rich, W.H. Auden and a great many others. Their choice of translations won't please everyone (missing are the clarity and detail of Rolfe Humphries' Ovid and the inventive versification of Robert Pinsky's Inferno), but from across the centuries and continents the poems in this collection remain remarkably fresh and alive.

* For 10 years, one major poet after another has selected 75 poems for the consistently excellent series "The Best American Poetry." Series editor David Lehman has invited Yale professor Harold Bloom to pick the 75 poems most worthy of rereading. The result is The Best of the Best American Poetry (Scribner, $15 paperback), a bracing collection that has something to please or offend almost everyone. Mr. Bloom's introduction is predictably persnickety, and the authors' comments on their poems have been carried forward from the original volumes. Its treasures include a "new" poem by Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Wright's concluding poem from Black Zodiac, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry last week.

* Closer to home, San Antonio novelist, playwright and poet Bryce Milligan has published (with Mary Guerrero Milligan and Angela de Hoyos) Floricanto Si!: A Collection of Latina Poetry (Penguin, $14.95 paperback). The ostensibly narrow focus shouldn't mislead. This is a rich collection of poems of great range and power.

Finally, two recent books that deserve reviews of their own:

Earlier this month, Radiography by Denton resident Bruce Bond (BOA Editions, $12.50 paperback) won the Texas Institute of Letters' Natalie Ornish Poetry Award. These pages shimmer as Mr. Bond's imagination takes us inside the night thoughts of a wife and the awakening of a boy "born blind," to Civil War battles, atomic bomb tests and Easter. The poet reinvents as he re-creates, in language that is crisp and vivid.

Donald Hall's Without (Houghton Mifflin, $22) documents his last year with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995 of leukemia, and the first year of his life without her. Miraculously, these poems are neither maudlin nor morose and lead us to some wonderful places. You will never experience a hospital the same way again after reading his poem "The Ship Pounding."

Tom Mayo is associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University and teaches "Law, Literature and Medicine" at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and the law school.

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