Now and Then, Mothers and Daughters, Sonnets and Sequences: Seven Poetry Books to Read This Month

The present moment is brief and sudden, and it’s really all we have: the feel of our feet on the ground, the endless stream of thoughts in our heads, and the visions before our eyes. We live in this messed up world, in all its stunning beauty, though in order to understand it, we must look to the past. That, it seems to me, is what the poets I read this month are up to: searching memory and history to figure out how we got here, and where exactly we are.

Tina Chang, Brenda Hillman and Layli Long Soldier consider what mothers pass along to their daughters, a dark dangerous world lit by small, luminous acts of love. Erin Belieu weighs a lifetime of memories and finds flexible footing in the uncertainty of this moment. Samuel Amadon electrifies the ordinary with words.

Two translations—of poems by the Indian mystic Mirabai and the contemporary Romanian poet Radu Vancu—seek to inhabit and transcend the history that holds up the present. These poets are here to help. Amadon makes of the sonnet an exuberant, spring-loaded, sonically awake check-in poem, an argument in favor of paying attention to the nearby world of “Pollen settled on the paint of my porch” and to the language that describes and transforms it: “I find these words/ Real beautiful.” Seeking to reveal a Stevensian “order” that animates a suburban world in which “cars/ Curve out of driveways in quiet arcs,” these proms gently aestheticize the every day.

The collection is also a seasonal day book, tracing a year of temperature changes, blooms, and dyings-off. Nothing startling happens yet so many things startle. Erin Belieu, Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems This beautiful retrospective volume shows a poet developing steadily, from the graceful descriptions and encoded trauma of the poems from the 1990s through the loosening music and political engagement of the books of the last ten years.

Throughout, shoots of sarcasm (“the prairie sulks/ like an ex-husband”) blossom from a dire sort of contemporary earthiness that grounds these lines. Belieu’s poems take place in the unfailingly disappointing real world, lit by the beauty of compromises and transgressions. The new poems—open, uncertain, slowly unfurling—are quietly thrilling, haunted by how “The stories we’re told/as children reside/ permanently inside us.// like measuring cups,// one fear sits snuggly/ inside the next, teaching/ us to tidy our darkness// into the smallest/ amount of space.” “I am destined to be brutally seen,” writes Chang in her formally varied and fourth collection, which meditates on what is passed between mothers and daughters, on visual art and myth, and especially on the threats posed to Asian American women during and since the pandemic.

Not being seen is also dangerous: “If only my people were not dying from being invisible.” The sacrifices of the poet’s mother (“She offered it all to me. I took and took”) ultimately protect the poet’s daughter, “a tender shoot,/ mothered, until she is an orchestra of light.” An extended meditation on the 2022 murder of Michelle Alyssa Go, who was pushed in front of an oncoming train, opens into a keening lament for violence against many others: “I struggle to live. I carry time that falls/ like chandeliers around me.” Though poetry can’t really protect anyone, Chang’s meets danger with extraordinary empathy: “Each time another woman died, I buried myself/ next to her, more of another world than here.” Brenda Hillman, Still House in the Desert In her most intimate and revealing book, and one of her best, Hillman applies her atomizing approach to the years and details of her mother’s life and her own childhood and youth.