Thursday's Three on Poetry

Some wonderful new collections of poetry have been published this year or are forthcoming. Below are three titles to consider adding to your reading list.

✭ The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) ~ Many esteemed poets, including Kim Addonizio, Meena Alexander, Ellen Bass, Sandra Beasley, Traci Brimhall, Jericho Brown, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Aracelis Girmay, Kimiko Hahn, Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, Ishion Hutchinson, Major Jackson, David Lehman, E Ethelbert Miller, and scores more (nearly 300 in all), have contributed to this remarkable anthology, edited by Peter Kahan, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith. Published this past January, the collection honoring poet and civil rights activist Gwendolyn Brooks features a new poetic form — the Golden Shovel — created by Terrance Hayes.

Read Terrance Hayes's "The Golden Shovel".

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was both a Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois (1968-2000) and a U.S. Poet Laureate (1985); she also was the first African American poet to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize (1950).

Read Rick Kogan's "Reciting the Praises — and Words — of Chicago Poet Gwendolyn Brooks", Chicago Tribune, March 13, 2017.

The 100th anniversary of Brooks's birth is June 17, 2017. See Our Miss Brooks 100 for information about centennial celebrations, which will continue through June 2018.

Our Miss Brooks on FaceBook

✭ In Memory of an Angel (City Lights Publishers, May 16, 2017) ~ This collection is second-generation New York School poet David Shapiro's first full-length book of poetry in 15 years. Titled after the Alban Berg violin concerto In Memory of an Angel, the collection addresses such subjects as childhood, fatherhood, Jewish identity, art history, and literature.

David Shapiro Poems at The Poetry Foundation

✭ Poems in the Manner Of (Scribner, March 7, 2017) ~ David Lehman, editor of the Best American Poetry series and the Oxford Book of American Poetry, offers admirers, readers, and students of poetry a wonderful collection of poems written "in the manner of" such poets as Catullus, Charles Bukowski, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats.

David Lehman Poems at The Poetry Foundation