The New York Times Brings Its Best Poetry Round-up

David Orr contributes his best of the year list to NYT's Book Review section. Orr writes:

In accordance with New York Times policy, this list contains no relatives, close friends, students, colleagues and so forth (which means that I can’t include Maureen N. McLane’s wily “Mz N: The Serial”; James Richardson’s gently arresting “During”; or Ishion Hutchinson’s “House of Lords and Commons,” which William Logan, in the Book Review, recently called “darkly tinged yet exuberant”). I’ve also generally favored work by poets I haven’t written about in previous years, as well as books not already featured on the year-end lists of other Times critics.

A few of his favorites:

NIGHT, by Etel Adnan (Nightboat, paper, $12.95). A fragmentary, aphoristic examination of night in all its illuminating darkness from a Lebanese-American poet who is also an admired visual artist. A PILLOW BOOK, by Suzanne Buffam (Canarium, paper, $14). The original “Pillow Book” was written by a lady of the Japanese court named Sei Shonagon around the turn of the 11th century, and was an assortment of fragmentary observations, musings and philosophical asides. In her own fearful, funny and bracingly intelligent version, which is sometimes in dialogue with Shonagon’s, Buffam gives us the night thoughts of an insomniac on motherhood, aging, relationships, guilty pleasures (“beating a child at checkers”), things that are “unendurable” (“Dreadlocks on a WASP”) and mustaches, among many other subjects. BESTIARY, by Donika Kelly (Graywolf, paper, $16). Kelly’s first book offers glassy, sculpted surfaces beneath which thoroughly black water churns (“I wake each morning / And am disappointed in the waking”). But her collection, which as its title implies is filled with symbolic creatures, is a testament to poetry’s ability to capture and refine emotion (“I filled the buckets / with salt / from my own / body”), rather than merely reflect it.

Learn more about Orr's picks at NYT.