Edited by Garrison Keiller
For regular NPR listeners, Keiller’s poem selections may be familiar. These are not hard poems. They don’t require you to have read English lit at Oxford or to be able to speak olde Englishe. Nor do they span hundreds of pages, warbling on about woe, despair, dying Ophelia or the terrible weight of love. The poems he has selected are each wonderful, complete gems – a crystal clear thought and scene in a few stanzas. Topics range from the biggies – death, love, old age, to silly limericks and odes to Mac computers and soda crackers. These are lovely books to have sitting about to dip into for a few pages at a time. And now I can even say I have read Bukowski.