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New at Peter White Public Library

What’s New at PWPL: U.P. Poetry

Acclaimed poet Sharon Olds once wrote, “Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.”

April is National Poetry Month. As part of the celebration, Peter White Public Library is hosting the second annual Great Lakes Poetry Festival. This year, the keynote reader for the GLPF is Diane Seuss, who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection frank sonnets, featuring poems that give voice to the voiceless. If you are in search of a poetic steam valve to kick off April, look no further than the programs and shelves at PWPL.

“Draw After Me” by Peter Cole (811.54 CO) is a collection of lyric poems that pushes the limits of syntax and image. With wit and heartbreak, Cole travels through the drawings of artist Terry Winters and letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Each line and word explore what it means to be holy human and wholly other. In the end, Cole arrives at the knowledge that being “blessed is never quite knowing, exactly, what those / blessings should be.”

John Keene’s National Book Award-winning collection “Punks: New & Selected Poems” (811.54 KE) weaves together historical and personal narratives, from the famous to the anonymous. The poems drip with lust and love and loss, chronicling times that brought friends, family, and partners together and tore them apart. Reading this book is like looking into a mirror, where love gazes back at “the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s / salted garden.” Keene advises us simply to “Love love.”

Current U. S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon’s “The Hurting Kind” (811.6 LI) is a tour of the seasons, from the “belted kingfisher, crested in its Aegean / blue plumage” of Spring to the “icicles dripped and sharpened / in my bones” of Winter. Limon’s poems are meditations on the interconnections between the mountain lion and banished wonders. You inhabit her lines like you inhabit a day, feeling the whiplash from darkness to light, ordinary to extraordinary, and back. Limon’s words reach off the page and plead for “you to touch me.”

The late Charles Simic’s last collection, “No Land in Sight” (811.54 SI), is a moving capstone to his tremendous body of poetry. A Pulitzer Prize winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate, Simic transforms everyday moments into occasions of spare revelation. The waves on York Beach look like they want to drown “a pair of unhappy lovers / On this cold December evening.” In a late summer dusk, a cricket proclaims, “My life is as real as yours.” These poems are celebrations and farewells, Simic giving the world one last gift.

Recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in poetry, Sharon Olds gives us “Balladz” (811.54 OL). Following her last two books (Arias and Odes), this collection has as its centerpiece two sections of ballads-poems consisting of four-line stanzas. These sections summon ghosts of Emily Dickinson and best friends and blossoming branches. As always, Olds’ language and imagery dance the fault between playful and sorrowful, proving once again why her poetic voice is so necessary and important.

Finally, the Marquette Poets Circle offers “Superior Voyage” (811 MA), its 10-year anthology. This collection, named a 2023 U. P. Notable Book, contains some of the most exciting poetic voices of the region, including 2023/2024 U. P. Poet Laureate Beverly Matherne giving us were-coons; Ronnie Ferguson listing “5 Truths for Today”; and Helen Haskell Remien going from “Somewhere to Somewhere Else.”

Any Yooper reading this anthology will find a steam valve, where the ordinary feelings and people in the U. P. can escape and be shown.

By Martin Achatz

Adult Programming Coordinator

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