Must-Read Poetry: May 2019

Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in May.

Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal

Take a poem from , and you have the whole book. This is meant to be an expansive, not reductive, observation—Rekdal’s poems have lush contours and routes without becoming labyrinthine; she offers questions in her narratives that are less conversational than illuminating. Take the grace and control of “Psalm,” the first poem in the collection. “Too soon, perhaps, for fruit”—the pause of the central word in that first sentence is like a sigh, the announcement that we must listen to the story about to be told. The narrator’s neighbor, despite the “ice-sheathed” branches, “waits, with her ladder and sack, for something to break.” She longs for growth, life: a gift. “So much abundance,” Rekdal writes, “and the only cost / waiting.” The narrator, present but not omnipresent (what control it takes to be there without being overbearing!), watches: “I almost expect the sound of bells, / a stone church, sheep in flocks.” This grand treeis one of the best books of the year: a tale of transformation and tragedy, arriving in poems a bit longer than other poets might dare—there’s a patience and persistence here. Take the enigmatic “Four Marys,” a meditation on Piero della Francesca’s (1460): “Are the drapes drawn open or being closed?” This is everything that ekphrastic poetry can be: “And even if I didn’t believe / the child would rise again, I would believe the artist.” A poem-essay midway through the collection, “Nightingale: A Gloss,” is alone worth the collection’s weight, but I hope readers are grateful for this entire book.