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April 30: Farewell, with poems by Jane Hirshfield and Simon Armitage

April 30: Farewell, with poems by Jane Hirshfield and Simon Armitage

Thank you for reading with us throughout April. For our final day, here’s a preview of poems by two writers whose books will be published this summer: Jane Hirshfield (from the forthcoming Come, Thief) and Simon Armitage (Seeing Stars).

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April 29: Langston Hughes’s “Daybreak in Alabama”

April 29: Langston Hughes’s “Daybreak in Alabama”

Before the month is gone, the great Langston Hughes.

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April 28: Sharon Olds’s “True Love”

April 28: Sharon Olds’s “True Love”

A love poem from the very center of life—from that mid-stage that is so often rushed and undefined, but is memorably chronicled in the poems of Sharon Olds.

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April 27: Peter Davison’s “The Level Path”

April 27: Peter Davison’s “The Level Path”

In the foreword to his final collection, Breathing Room, Peter Davison (1928-2004) wrote about his desire to write poems that could “evoke a mood, a scene, an enimga, the unfolding of a metaphor, the entrapment of an idea, in a space or shape that will contain it without killing it.” “The Level Path,” the penultimate poem in the book, presents us with a vivid instance of such unfolding and entrapment—in this case, the inability to turn back from beauty and where it may lead us.

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April 26: W. B. Yeats’s “Down by the Salley Gardens”

April 26: W. B. Yeats’s “Down by the Salley Gardens”

From the newly published Irish Poems, a love song by Yeats, based on an old ballad. (Don’t miss the audio link today: Irish author Maeve Binchy picked one of her favorites in the collection, Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-term Break,” to read aloud.)

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April 25: C.P. Cavafy’s “The Mirror in the Entrance”

April 25: C.P. Cavafy’s “The Mirror in the Entrance”

A poem of 1930 by the great C. P. Cavafy; it is translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn, who explores Cavafy’s sense of beauty in his introduction to Collected Poems. He writes, “The rich, perfervid, sensuous present of most lives is lost forever to recollection: only the living memory of that past, memory that is itself alchemized into something permanent, and permanently beautiful, by poetry, ‘preserves’ them forever.” Here, the mirror plays the role of recaller and preserver, with Cavafy’s sly assistance.

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April 24: Brooks Haxton’s “Three Lilies”

April 24: Brooks Haxton’s “Three Lilies”

A poem for Easter morning, from Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms, by Brooks Haxton. In his preface to these poems, which answer back to or jump off from the psalms he learned in childhood, Haxton reflects on “the challenge of letting the Psalms, like any art that matters, find us where we live.” One pleasure of Haxton’s poetic reactions to the Psalms is the intertwining of contradictory responses—he captures the beauty of ambivalence, which seems to enhance our aesthetic experience of creation and even of religious feeling.

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April 23: Franz Wright’s “Rooms”

April 23: Franz Wright’s “Rooms”

One of Franz Wright’s miniatures—those exquisite small poems which open up worlds. (This one originally appeared in his Entry in an Unknown Hand, 1989).

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April 22: Kwon Homun’s “Two Poems On Fishing”

April 22: Kwon Homun’s “Two Poems On Fishing”

Today’s selection, by Kwon Homun, a Korean poet whose dates are 1532-1587, touches on one of the key themes in poetry about fishing, as captured in the delightful Pocket Poets collection The Art of Angling.

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April 21: Stan Rice’s “Tornado at Night”

April 21: Stan Rice’s “Tornado at Night”

A poem of wild weather from Stan Rice (1942-2002), whose concise songs of praise continue to fascinate.

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Knopf's Poem-A-Day 2010

April 1: Edward Hirsch’s “Self-portrait”
April 2: Marge Piercy’s “Seven Horses”
April 3: Dan Chiasson’s “Banquette” and “Next”
April 4: Marie Ponsot’s “Transport”
April 5: Alexander Neubauer’s Poetry in Person, featuring Derek Walcott
April 6: Mark Strand’s “Mirror”
April 7: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Spring”
April 8: Philip Levine’s “MY FATHERS, THE BALTIC”
April 9: Vera Pavlova’s “A Remedy for Insomnia”
April 10: Stan Rice’s “The Fragment of Statue”
April 11: Marina Tsvetayeva’s “Poems Grow”
April 12: Kevin Young’s “EYES + EGGS [1983]“
April 13: Janusz Szuber’s “About a Boy Stirring Jam”
April 14: Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”
April 15: Franz Wright’s "My Pew"
April 16: Mary Jo Salter’s “Welcome to Hiroshima”
April 17: Yehuda Halevi’s “A man in your fifties—and you still would be young?”
April 18: Langston Hughes’s “Black Workers” and “Black Dancers”
April 19: W. S. Di Piero’s “In Our Room”
April 20: Robert Wrigley’s “Kissing a Horse”
April 21: Sharon Olds’s “When He Came for the Family” and “The Signal”
April 22: Irving Feldman’s “Stretched Out at Length”
April 23: W.S. Merwin’s “The Furrow”
April 24: David Lehman’s “Poem in the Manner of a Jazz Standard”
April 25: John Keats’s “This Living Hand”
April 26: Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes
April 27: Garrett Hongo’s “Volcano House”
April 28: Wallace Stevens’s “Large Red Man Reading”
April 29: Izumi Shikibu’s love poems
April 30: Deborah Digges's "Write a Book a Year"