Poets’ Corner

The Best Poems of the English Language

Harold Bloom

HarperCollins: 972 pp., $34.95

Like his towering literary forebear, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Harold Bloom is both a canonical critic and a standard-setter. He has also been a source of literary enlightenment for a public increasingly out of touch with great works of the imagination. In a time when few people read for beauty or complexity in language, when what often passes for literary scholarship is sociology, Harold Bloom is here to save the day. He is, like Johnson, a fierce and contentious presence. His assessment of Johnson mirrors his own achievement: “[H]is critical genius emerges most strongly when he reminds us what literature is for.”

In “The Best Poems of the English Language,” Bloom reminds us what great poetry is and is for. He selects and comments on some of the most beautiful, moving and powerful poems ever written from Chaucer through Frost (included are only those poets whose birthdates are pre-1900) using his trinity of absolute criteria: “aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, and wisdom.” Part rabbi, part vaudeville act, complete uncompromising inspired exegete, Bloom continues to renew what James Boswell called “the art of thinking” in a poetry anthology of and for the ages.

*

The Clerk’s Tale

Spencer Reece

Mariner Books: 80 pp., $12

Poetry’s ability to remake what has come before is well known. Yet in “The Clerk’s Tale” (winner of the 2003 Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize), the line from Chaucer to a young clerk in Minneapolis selling men’s shirts at a shop in the Mall of America is not necessarily a traceable ancestry, rather a turn of mind taken from the original tale from which the title derives: a notion of “service,” of loyalty, eccentric obedience to “vows.”

The masterful title poem recasts our notion of the heroic -- we bear witness to two tired employees of Brooks Brothers, one a perceptive young poet:

He does this because his acceptance is finally complete --

and complete acceptance is always

bittersweet. Our hours are long. Our backs bent.

we are more gracious than English royalty.

The remarkable modesty and focused tone of these poems provide an alternative to the poetry of self-congratulatory and manipulative “effect” we are so burdened with these days. This is virtuosity that is also patient and polished -- that swerves into cathedral light, into poems of great humanity.

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Ghost Orchid

Maurya Simon

Red Hen Press: 76 pp., $12.95

Maurya SIMON has always been a soulful poet and in her new book, “Ghost Orchid,” she creates a kind of Augustinian force field, interrogating the soul, God and gods, even into the uncharted territories of life after death, beyond hell and heaven:

It was my turn to dance with God

And I’d just pulled on a brash new body

One sweet with bruises from the after-life

“Heaven has enough windows for everyone” Simon says -- and the reader is willing to trust the authorial consciousness that tells us so.

*

Trapeze

Deborah Digges

Alfred A. Knopf: 72 pp., $23

In “Trapeze,” Deborah Digges faces the hardest questions we can ask of age and death, body and soul. This is not metaphysical inquiry, and she is not necessarily interested in answers: Rather, she is interested in capturing the immanence of the ordinary. She stares hard at the oblivion gazing back at us. The tone of these poems is pitch-perfect -- the music of the elegy wild but subdued. She mourns the dead, in particular her lost husband:

Don’t call them back, don’t call them in for supper.

See they leave scuff marks like jet trails in the sky.

Gardens grow wild, houses fall into disrepair, but the mind goes on remembering the loved body and the “young selves waving back from the shore” -- this is elegy refracted and afloat in a prism. “On which side of the river should I wait?” and the “voice that found me gave me the news” -- this is how the poems go on talking to themselves, Hardy-esque, injured and emphatic.