Best Book of 2007

I used to listen to a Prairie Home Companion on the car radio when I was traveling on the road a few years back and then lost track of the program until the movie came out, and then I began to listen again. I subscribed to some email newsletter from the website and was pleased to receive The Writer's Almanac for the last year or so. From the poems that appear daily in this eNewsletter and on the website, Garrison Keillor selected two volumes of the poems of talented authors and placed them in anthologies. I am privileged to own the second volume.

These are certainly hard times in this decade and will be for about 50 years to come, no doubt. I always say that one should learn something new every day and if not - look something up. Nowadays, I not only something new every day, but also something I did not want to know! This book of poems has helped put it all into perspective. Poetry is used in psychological therapy and I can see why. You don't even need to write it for a positive effect - just read it. Poetry is healing.

The good poems in this book are straightforward and thoughtful, making the reade5r think if not lifting the spirits with every word. I keep coming back to it of all the books I have read in 2007. Some nights I cannot put it down. Every night, I lay it at the foot of the large bed so it is within easy reach. The book fascinates me equally with Burma Shave and William Blake - the commercial quip to the profound. The book gives me contact with living poets and dead poets and I like to be in their society. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth; dozens of others.

These poems might brace up the arms of Moses during the battle. They lift the bruised heart high above the fray and set one's feet on a mountain top. Some provide validation in an explosion of insight for justice. Many are about ordinary people - the average Joe that is many of us and who has survived. More than survived - he has not settled for less than he deserves.

Garrison Keillor's introduction could stand by itself as literature. It is a little political. Poets are political - they change the world with words that spur people to action. They commemorate, commiserate and celebrate. Hey remind us of situations that we should not forget and teach us for the first time about others that we knew nothing about.

I have said and still feel that America's major political parties are writhing at the far extremes that they look like a snake eating its own tail. Forget politics -- read a poem. Then send one to a friend. Send one to me.

Ode to American English by Barbara Hamby; excerpt

...but no one uses the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,

in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,

"Dude, wake up," and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie

mummy, "Whoa, I was toasted."

I wish I could think of lines like this!

The Con Job by Charles Bukowski, first stanza

the con job

the ground war began today

at dawn

in a desert land

far from here.

the U.S. ground troops were

largely

made up of

Blacks, Mexicans and poor

whites

most of whom had joined

the military

because it was the only job

they could find.

I never though of forcing people into the armed services by raising prices and outsourcing jobs overseas. Now I'm thinking.

Proverbs of Hell by William Blake; excerpts

• She whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
• The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.
• All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap.
• No bird soars too high, if she soars with her own wings.
• The most sublime act is to set another before you .
• The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
• Expect poison from standing water.
• You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.
• The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
• Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

How true these proverbs are.

Death Mask by Edward Field; first section

1

In the mirror now,

what I see

reminds me

I won't be here forever.

I don't feel like

that face at all.

Inside it, I protest,

I'm quite different.

It's somebody's grandfather,

not me.

Whose grandfather is that?

I don't want him.

Field's poem reminds me of every time that I have seen an aging movie star on screen after a long absence. Many times I have gasped aloud, "Oh my God, they look like their own grandfather." There are things one can do to prevent some of the cosmetic qualifications of the aged, but people get into a rut, like they're glued to a chair watching a long movie, waiting for the commercial that never comes on HBO. And so it goes. Claudette Colbert looked much the same to me in her 20s and 70s, but not everyone can pull that one off. My own peers look as though they should be my grandparents, but on a day when I'm tired, they only look like they could be my parents...

I want to be like the aged eagle that flies to a mountain top in the west of this country to star into the sun. He stares and stares until he loses his feather, his beak and his talons and while he continues to fixate on the sun, he grows all new ones! The he flies off for the great Chapter II of his life. I don't know what happens when he wears out the second time...Twice around may be enough.

For A Five-Year-Old by Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill

into your room, after a night of rain.

You call me in to see, and I explain

that it would be unkind to leave it there:

it might crawl to the floor; we must take care

that no one squashes it. You understand,

and carry it outside, with careful hand,

to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:

your gentleness is moulded still by words

from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,

from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed

your closest relatives, and who purveyed

the harshest kind of truth to many another.

But that is how things are: I am your mother,

And we are kind to snails.