Poetry x 10

The first half of December is, for me, the least propitious time of year for reading. There just never seems to be any time for it. Rather than write about books I’ve just finished (there are none), I’ll have to cast my net further back, in this case bringing up ten of the single-author poetry books I’ve read this year. Three are by Nobel laureates: Wisława Szymborska (1996); Tomas Tranströmer (2011) and Louise Glück (2020). I ordered Glück’s The Wild Iris in what was effectively a very delayed reaction to her winning the prize: I’d seen a great deal of praise of her work, of which I’d read scarcely any. I owned collections by Szymborska (and by Primo Levi) in the past, so these were re-aquaintances rather than fresh introductions.

Seven of the ten are books are translated, variously from the Russian (Aleksandr Kushner); Italian (Levi); Venezuelan Spanish (Eugenio Montejo); Czech (Kateřina Rudčenková); Polish (Szymborska); Swedish (Tranströmer); and Romanian (Liliana Ursu), with the remainder by American authors. Not pictured, but also read in 2024, were volumes by John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson and Frank O’Hara; by Álvaro Mutis; by C.P. Cavafy, Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Giuseppe Ungaretti; and by British & Irish poets only Christina Rossetti & Ciaran Carson. All of which was part of the effort to fill out my poetry bookshelves.

In a dream I look down
at the wide Chinese river at dawn
intoxicatingly bright lanterns swaying above it.
I have to write a poem about this right now, I tell myself,
before I wake up
before the first light –
while it’s all still true.

—Kateřina Rudčenková (translated by Alexandra Büchler).