06/27/99

By Tom Mayo

Poetry

OK, you're making up your list of things to pack for that summer trip, or simply trying to organize your reading plan before Memorial Day becomes too distant a memory. Why not include some poetry? That's right - poetry.

But where to start? The list of forgotten or overlooked poets, of "should read" or "will get to later" is so long. And the choices: Lyric, epic or dramatic? Romantic or antic? Modern? Postmodern?

The trick, I submit, is to develop a strategy: Define your goals, and the plan will follow.

Pack light

Carry around one or two volumes that will fit in one of your airline carry-on bags and that you can comfortably pick up and put down within short bursts of time and attention. Anthologies will do nicely, providing a mini-library of sorts and enough variety to maintain interest. Consider Joel Connaroe's Six American Poets (Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Frost, Hughes) or his later Eight American Poets (Bishop, Merrill, Plath, Ginsberg, Roethke, Berryman, Sexton, Lowell), both published by Vintage/Random House. The samplings are more extensive than most anthologies can afford to provide, the choices are consistently interesting, and the introductory essays are helpful and succeed in staying out of the way of the poetry itself.

Narrow the focus

"Summer reading" is a category defined by our temporary ability to dote on authors and works for which, during the rest of the year, there just isn't enough time. For this strategy, consider the collected works of one or two poets and stick with them for the next three months.

Fortunately, publishing houses are busily putting out career-.summing collections by some great poets. I'm a sucker for that wounded tough guy, Raymond Carver, so the appearance this year of All of Us: The Collected Poems (Knopf, $27.50) was genuinely cause for celebration. His last poems, many written after learning his cancer had returned and he would soon die of it, are my favorites here, and one or two of them would alone be worth the price of the book.

Seamus Heaney's Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25) is another great choice. Though he is not an ostensibly political poet, his poems are so physically connected to Ireland that they are the next best thing to being there, and his included 1995 Nobel Lecture argues that his work is more politically grounded than is often credited.

Another recent Nobel winner, Wislawa Szymborska, also has published a career-spanner: Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 (Harcourt Brace, $27). Ms. Szymborska's range is breathtaking, from her riff on infinity as expressed by that most famous of irrational numbers ("pi") to living with plants. She effortlessly expands and contracts her frames of reference, never losing her grasp on what it means to be human in this or any other century. Her 1996 Nobel Lecture is here, too, and it is both shorter and more profoundly moving than Mr. Heaney's. She agrees with him on at least one point, however (in "Children of Our Age"):

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it's a question, as always, of politics.

Bring something for the kids

You never know when kids will need a diversion - the third hour of a rainstorm, the second day of a cross-country trip or the first time the lifeguards clear the youngsters out of the pool to make way for "adult swim." Pack anything by Shel Silverstein (A Light in the Attic, Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Giving Tree) out of respect for the poet who died last month and because, if the kids aren't yet terminally hip teens, they will love rereading these favorites. And if we aren't yet terminally hip adults, we will enjoy these poems, too. No one was better at reminding us how the world looks from a height of 3 feet in your stocking feet.

Enjoy the company of word travelers

Some poets travel well or help us travel well whether we are literally or metaphorically on the road. Elizabeth Bishop was a great (if somewhat skeptical) traveler and wrote wonderfully of her visitations. Her Collected Poems: 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $13 paperback) covers the globe and leaves us breathless at the end of her trip. George Mackay Brown (Selected Poems 1954-1992, University of Iowa Press) spent all but a couple of years of his life on Scotland's far northern Orkney Islands, and his poems convey the ancient myth and mystery of a land little-known even to many Scots.

Happy summer reading!

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

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