Thin Volumes

The economics of print poetry publication being what they are, the best even well know poets can hope for is a new "thin volume" every few years. Given the severe selection pressures on these books, they are like intense portals of effort and desire. As physical objects, they are often beautiful, the cover art, the attention to the print fonts used, the quality of the paper, let alone the poems that made the cut.

This is a somewhat random selection of thin volumes that I stumbled across and enjoyed. If you want to explore a little more systematically, Heresy and the Ideal by David Baker provides a good overview of quite a few contemporary poets.

John Ashbery is like Wallace Stevens in the evasiveness and painterliness of many of his poems. And as with Stevens, it is tempting at times to give up on him. Please, tell me something! I am reminded of a Stevens letter responding to someone who asked what a poem meant. He said it means just what it says. And for some reason I keep wanting more. Wakefulness is interesting as, among other things, a work of old age. Is this how an old man writes?
The Truth about Small Towns by David Baker promises to tell me something that I really want to know. But alas, it is not that easy. Small towns, like romances or memories of our mothers and fathers or overgrown farm fields, are not as simple as we might initially think.
The Boat of Quiet Hours by Jane Kenyon celebrates in clear and simple language the passing moments of an everyday life. Life seems like just one moment after another, one experience after another. Gleaning and appreciating these moments that were ours, does it give meaning? That is the hope that poetry like this offers.
Little Girls in Church is by Kathleen Norris, the author of the Plains journal, Dakota, which I also enjoyed. She calls this book of poems, like Dakota, a spiritual geography. She finds spiritual meaning in the landscape, people, and stories of the prairies and in her own search with all that unnervingly open space as a backdrop.
The House of Days by Jay Parini explores the interface between the inner life of the scholar and the natural world, the ever-changing scenery and weather of rural New England with his appropriation of the words of Emerson in his search for a transcendence that may not come.
The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich explores in part whether it is possible to show the contour's of a person's heart and mind in a language that is accessible by everyone. Or are we going to be split into different language ghettoes, not able to reach each other.
Coming into Eighty by May Sarton takes on the subject of herself in old age. She is a foreigner in the land of old age. These poems explore the everyday details of her life, writing letters, taking care of her cat, gardening, along with the larger issues of life and death and living alone.
Dime Store Erotics by Ann Townsend explores the everyday and the strange dangers and questions around the edges of the everyday. I have an odd analogy. I got a similar feeling in reading this as when I read the Poetic Eddas, of looking from a great distance into a way of living very different than mine. Yet the poems are set here in my same place and time.