Lifesaving Poems

Inspired by a remark of Seamus Heaney, Lifesaving Poems began life as notebook, then a blog. How many poems, Heaney wondered, was it possible to recall responding to, over a lifetime? Was it ten, he asked, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more? Lifesaving Poems is a way of trying to answer that question. Giving himself the constraint of choosing no more than one poem per poet, Anthony began copying poems out, one at a time, as it were for safekeeping. He asked himself: was the poem one he could recall being moved by the moment he first read it? And: could he live without it? Then he posted each poem on his blog and said why he liked it. Word spread and soon his blog had thousands of followers, everyone reading and responding to the poems he talked about - and sharing his posts. Now Lifesaving Poems has turned into an anthology, not one designed to be a perfect list of 'the great and the good', but a gathering of poems he happens to feel passionate about, according to his tastes. As Billy Collins says: 'Good poems are poems that I like'. Anthony's popular personal commentaries are included with the poems. There are Lifesaving Poems by John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Raymond Carver, Carol Ann Duffy, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Marie Howe, Jaan Kaplinski, Brendan Kennelly, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Norman MacCaig, Ian McMillan, Derek Mahon, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jo Shapcott, Tomas Transtromer, Wislawa Szymborska, and many, many others.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR ??“To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” —Time “A captivating collection from a wise, accessible poet.” —People From the award-winning poet and bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Keep Moving, and Good Bones, a stunning poetry collection that celebrates the beauty and messiness of life. With her breakout bestseller Keep Moving, Maggie Smith captured the nation with her “meditations on kindness and hope” (NPR). Now, with Goldenrod, the award-winning poet returns with a powerful collection of poems that look at parenthood, solitude, love, and memory. Pulling objects from everyday life—a hallway mirror, a rock found in her son’s pocket, a field of goldenrods at the side of the road—she reveals the magic of the present moment. Only Maggie Smith could turn an autocorrect mistake into a line of poetry, musing that her phone “doesn’t observe / the high holidays, autocorrecting / shana tova to shaman tobacco, / Rosh Hashanah to rose has hands.”​ Slate called Smith’s “superpower as a writer” her “ability to find the perfect concrete metaphor for inchoate human emotions and explore it with empathy and honesty.” The poems in Goldenrod celebrate the contours of daily life, explore and delight in the space between thought and experience, and remind us that we decide what is beautiful.

Hayden Carruth's letters to Jane Kenyon between April, 1994 and April, 1995, the year she was dying.

James Galvin is a Wyoming rancher and on the permanent faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Poems to read in the small hours before dawn, when the sirens start up again. Swivelmount’s concerns – the collapse of subject and world, eros and law, knowledge and bafflement – gain new urgency as Babstock fiercely reimagines and reassembles the remnants into a viable order. At the core of their kinetic imagery is a freefall into mourning, but also a faith in others: a Babstock poem is the voice next to you in the ER waiting room, becalmed, compassionate, darkly humorous. This is Babstock at his best. Past Praise: “This is a poetry that is so uncompromising in how it deals with traditions – of poetic forms, of dictions, of militaristic histories – that it becomes something magnificent: brittle and hard. It will change how you think.” —Juliana Spahr for On Malice “On Malice is a fascinating and elegiac rebuke to surveillance technologies and its discontents. Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet. His work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity.” —Peter Gizzi “The flavour of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge.” —Ange Mlinko for Methodist Hatchet “I felt as if I were reading poems written with a scalpel. Methodist Hatchet swaggers with confidence, intelligence, technique, humour, and that pinioning accuracy of observation we’ve come to expect from Babstock, surely one of the most versatile, switched-on, and linguistically savvy poets of our time.” —Simon Armitage “Methodist Hatchet is as precise as it is expansive, as complex as it is companionable. It refuses to look away from the unstable nature of self and world and word. That is why Babstock is one of the most exciting lyric poets writing today.” —Sina Queyras, The Globe and Mail for Methodist Hatchet

In 1996, Simon Armitage bought a powerful Russian telescope and began to inspect the night sky from his West Yorkshire home. The sequence of short poems in the middle of this book must have something to do with that new interest, each receiving its classical title from one of the constellations, while turning out to be less concerned with pure astronomy than with moments in the life of the poet's mind. Celestial themes loom large elsewhere, with a number of what could be called religious poems towards the beginning of the book, and a play based on events around a total eclipse of the sun at the end. This dramatic tour de force was commissioned by the National Theatre, for performance by children, and confirmed Armitage as one of our true poetic experimenters - ceaselessly exploring and capable of making his stylistic advances without ever losing the confidence of his audience.