Fear less Poetry in perilous times

Smith (To Free the Captives, 2023) draws on her expertise as an acclaimed poet, Harvard professor, and former U.S. Poet Laureate to coax and inspire those who are apprehensive about reading poetry to overcome their reluctance, their fear. Smith assures readers that poems are not puzzles to be solved. They are about feelings. She describes "poetry's capacity to call to a reader's empathy and curiosity." Our times are made perilous by how divided a nation we are; poems, Smith assures us, "are built to bridge distances of all kinds." Smith recounts how profoundly receptive people were to poetry all over the country during her "wildly heartening" American Conversations project and shares personal struggles and what poetry has meant to her. Throughout her elucidation of what a poem is, how poems work, and what poems do, Smith presents and discusses poems by a resplendent array of poets, including Robert Hayden, Joy Harjo, Mark Doty, Danez Smith, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Harryette Mullen, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Francisco Márquez. A gracefully illustrative look at how poetry grapples with and mitigates grief, fear, conflict, and loss.

An invitation to poetry. Pulitzer Prize--winner Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019, sees reading poetry as far more than an aesthetic experience. Poems, she writes, "can help you to love every other thing in the world around you," inspiring empathy and curiosity, and mitigating fear. In each of five chapters, she offers a guide to reading, questioning, and rereading a generous selection of poems, urging us to ask how each poem matters to us. "Sometimes," she writes, "a poem charges my way as if from across an epic expanse, shattering my comfortable view of the world and my usual place within it." She begins with poems that helped her to find a "self full of light and hope" after her mother's death. Deeply grieving, she found solace in Mark Doty's "Ararat," a poem about an Easter egg hunt, which she read as a kind of elegy. The poem helped her to answer the overwhelming question: "How am I to go on living after hope and happiness have been taken away?" Many poems come from struggle, from feeling lost, including her own "The United States Welcomes You," about police violence against unarmed Black citizens, and Harryette Mullen's "We Are Not Responsible." Mullen's devastating poem uses familiar corporate disclaimers to critique oppression and lack of protection for the vulnerable: "Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments….In the event of loss, you'd better look out for yourself." Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Assault" and Natasha Tretheway's "Incident" evoke each poet's sense of vulnerability in the face of real, or anticipated, threat. The author devotes a chapter to explaining how a poem functions and how its parts convey meaning. An appendix contains a biographical and critical summary for each of the 27 poets Smith mentions. A spirited literary journey. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.