It’s hard to imagine applying the “best...

It’s hard to imagine applying the “best of” or Oscar mentality to poetry, the one art that has (more or less) managed to escape commodification and Hollywoodization. Still, every year brings an abundance of poetry books that deserve acknowledgment and praise -- yet few are recognized in journals, fewer still in the pages of our newspaper book sections.

The most illuminating aspect of the recent $100-million endowment given to Poetry magazine was not the size of the gift but rather the subsequent revelation (reported in The Times, “Regarding Media,” Nov. 23) that Poetry gets roughly 90,000 submissions yearly from all over the world and its monthly circulation peaks at just 10,000. Its subscription base is tiny. Literary magazines and hosts of literary contests have struggled with this awkward truth for some time: There are a whole lot of would-be poets out there who are writing but not reading. So here’s a toast to the rigors and blessings of reading poetry, to reading itself -- to understanding that before we can learn to write, we must learn to read with passion and profound attention.

Poetry had a very good year in 2002: Many superb collections were published. A few of these books were reviewed in this column. There are many others worthy of consideration and praise that never made it into this column -- and then there are books (poems and essays on poems) that have been simply neglected overall. We seem to have a diminished taste for truly challenging poetry, poetry that demands something of us as readers -- and a nearly nonexistent capacity to appreciate serious literary essays not of the “how to write a bestseller” variety. Below are a few of these titles.

“Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets. Without their help we can but trifle,” cries Virginia Woolf (our poet-in-prose) from the pages of “On Being Ill” (Paris Press: 64 pp., $20), a most unusual and long-neglected reverie on illness, language and poetry -- reprinted by the sterling Paris Press with an introduction by Hermione Lee and a reproduction of the book’s original 1930 Hogarth Press cover by Vanessa Bell. Woolf lets her consciousness roam over the unpredictable terrain of sickness -- the sick body, the sick mind -- and how difficult it is for us to find words to describe this altered state.

This is a brilliant and odd book, charged with restrained emotion and sudden humor -- a book set aside and “lost” for some time: “Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way.... Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable. But in health the genial pretense must be kept up and the effort renewed.... In illness this make-believe ceases.”

Maxine Hong Kingston has published a collection of essays titled “To Be the Poet” (Harvard University Press: 144 pp., $19.95) -- a jaunty, offhand grab bag of insights: “My two grandfathers sat atop the stagecoach drawn by two black horses, / and laughed, and clapped their hands. “Ah” they said. “Ah-h-h.” Let me / have poetry to be like that once again, and I shall die happy.”

Robert Pinsky’s “Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry” (Princeton University Press: 88 pp., $14.95) attempts to “locate” poetry within American culture -- the expression of the individual voice is at the heart of democracy, yet poems also imagine readers and fellow spirits. Pinsky is, by turns, whimsical and profound. He makes the distinction, at one point, between poetry and “Hollywood”: “[S]houldn’t poetry be part of show business? Or even, why does poetry seem out of step with the entertainment industry? ... The form of the question might be, ‘Have your poems been set to music?’ Well, yes, but to paraphrase a great poet, I thought that I was doing that when I wrote them.”

Books of poems -- known and less well known -- call for our attention. Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan-born poet, has translated the anarchical, musical poetry of the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef in “Without an Alphabet, Without a Face” (Graywolf Press: 216 pp., $16). Mattawa has captured the sprawling, expansive lyrical passions of this poet, who was born in Basra in 1934 and left Iraq in 1979 to wander the world in exile. The translations feel at times slightly unfocused, but they are always arresting and fresh:

In the markets of bel-Abbes,

in the city center,

in the cafes where coffee grains never settle in the bottom of the pot,

and in the bars where the hour is always late,

you will hear them whisper:

‘The emigrant has come.’

“The Unswept Room” (Alfred A. Knopf: 96 pp., $15) by Sharon Olds reconfirms this renowned poet’s devastating emotional clarity and eerie capacity to both ingratiate and shock. These poems, mainly focusing on the mother-daughter dyad, are startling, ecstatic and often a little reckless. From her poem “Mother”: “Whatever she was to me, she was / the human caught in something she could hardly / bear, she was like a flying, keening / being limed and jessed, a small / soprano of trees ....”

The legendary New York poet Kenneth Koch died this year, and two books of his appeared in 2002, from the same publisher. “Sun Out” (Alfred A. Knopf: 144 pp., $25) features poems selected from 1952 to 1954, and “A Possible World” (Alfred A. Knopf: 112 pp., $24) is three new long poems. It is nearly impossible to characterize the poems of this dashing, sardonic, nutty, constantly questioning poet. Koch could sail from the Surrealist

Roof in me, tone-deaf flail!

Clubfoot, mirror, cacophony!

Orchestra of picture-mail

Seed-catalogue of yellow finch-valentines,

Drive mirth to sleep!

to the reflective

Better one day as a lion

Then one hundred years as a mouse.

Mussolini’s theory

Which gives rise to doubts.

After this one day

You would be a dead lion

or a live mouse

It would be the same thing.

and preserve an absolute equilibrium.

Steve Orlen’s poems in “This Particular Eternity” (Ausable Press: 88 pp., $14) are written in a voice that speaks to us confidentially, seductively. We believe in the speaker of these closely observed, ruthlessly funny and touching poems. From “Butterflies That Save Us From Ourselves”:

It came in pills, the mescaline, very fat, imposing translucent capsules,

And inside, the blue powder which promised, Jon said,

To revert us to our true characters, then went into the bathroom

With a pile of books, ran the water, and lay in the tub,

Calling out every once in a while, How’s everyone doing?

Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Shadow of Heaven” (W.W. Norton: 72 pp., $21) contains the finest poems to date of this infinitely versatile lyrical poet, whose charged poems stay somehow utterly present, connected to the immediate, yet always open to the sublime:

The cardinal sings and sings: hunter’s horn;

then artillery. The round red door to its heart

is always open. And now the same song

from down the street, this time a mockingbird

which, like the emperor’s toy, can do it better.

Ruth Stone, whose book “In the Next Galaxy” (Copper Canyon: 100 pp., $20) just won the National Book Award, has been a quiet presence in American poetry. Her work has never been fashionable, yet she is thought of as an Akhmatova-like figure. Like the great Russian modernist’s, her phrasing is declarative, succinct, self-contained but filled with emotional power. Now, at 83, she is losing her eyesight, but her poetic vision is keener than ever:

Fog beads along the wires.

Last night’s implant in the brain,

useless information after the facts,

like the gradual glitch of shifting faults,

almost unnoticed; in the way

two birds streak through the air,

in the wing language of April,

above them the dark metaphor

of two soundless fighter jets.

“As water given sugar sweetens, given salts grows salty, / we become our choices,” writes Jane Hirshfield in “Given Sugar, Given Salt” (HarperPerennial: 96 pp., $13.95). Few other poets honor what Hirshfield honors with such natural affection and precision -- the ordinary objects of life and the deep current of poetry that flows through them: “Shy, the scissors and spoons, the blue mug. / Hesitant even the towels, / for all their intimate knowledge and scent of fresh bleach.”

The poems in “Rock Harbor” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 128 pp., $20) by Carl Phillips are both formal and casual, giving us the lineaments of interior life in beautiful, attenuated, enigmatic style: “an unexpected heat in late / October brings / now the worker bees / confused, instinctive, / back.”

“Three Poets of Modern Korea” (Sarabande Books: 72 pp., $13.95) introduces us to the work of Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon and Choi Young-Mi, as translated by Yu Jung-Yul and James Kimbrell. We are given three generations here -- and three completely different voices that nevertheless provide a clear sense of the range of poetry within contemporary Korean culture.

Had I space enough and time, I would talk about poems by Geoffrey Hill, Anne Carson, Paul Muldoon, Cleopatra Mathis, Cal Bedient (“The Violence of the Mourning”), David St. John (“Prism”), Rodney Jones, Robert MacDowell (“On Foot, in Flames”), Virgil Suarez, Robin Behn (“Horizon Note”), Mark Doty (“Seeing Venice: Bellotto’s Grand Canal”), Elena Byrne, Ralph Angel, Gretchen Mattox, Honor Moore (“Darling”) and many others. Contemporary poets mourn our loss of the great poet (born in Kashmir) Agha Shahid Ali. It is imperative that we read poetry -- and not just what might fashionably be termed the “best of.” Why? It is difficult to get the news from poems, as William Carlos Williams remarked, yet “men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”