Poetry Picks: The Best Books of 2006

Teahouse of the Almighty: Poems, by Patricia Smith

(Coffee House Press, 2006) Poetry Book of the Year, Teahouse of the Almighty is the work of a woman who clobbered the world as a young poet. It’s been 13 years since her last book, but the wait was worth it. Selected by Ed Sanders (“I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem”) as the Coffee House National Poetry Series winner, Teahouse not only includes poems every bit as powerful as Smith’s signature early pieces, but goes more places, covers more distance, takes more audacious risks than ever. This book puts to rest forever the question of “great performer, but on the page?”

Orient Point: Poems, by Julie Sheehan

(W.W. Norton & Co., 2006) Here we have the natural impulse of Amy Clampitt, the unveering gaze of Marie Ponsot. Julie Sheehan is a surrealist in the kitchen, a documentarian of dreams. She is everyday fearless, an unassuming beauty. Orient Point, that’s Long Island, right? Right. And yet. Here are poems that fade slowly as sunset, only to rekindle, catch light, refract, catch fire. It’s a family saga, right? Right. And yet. I dig Julie’s poems deeply, their jazz and burn.

Femme du Monde: Poems, by Patricia Spears Jones

(Tia Chucha Press, 2006) From Amos’n’Andy to Comme des Garcons, Patricia Spears Jones hauls the world into the delightful Femme du Monde (“Woman of the World”). Patricia is artist as poet -- she applies various finishes, she is aware of looking, there is a critic working with the form. This makes for a book of wonderful surprises and a shimmer surface. Speaking of which, Sandra Payne’s htmlizations of Patricia’s and others’ poems is a must-see site. Click on the third panel to experience “Shimmer,” on the fifth to learn “How He Knows Me.” More sensuous than pornographic. But it’s close!

On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay, by Robert Creeley

(University of California Press, 2006) Creeley’s final book is On Earth. Where else? Creeley at once the most grounded, and, somehow, most ethereal of poets, says it simply and oft in rhyme, the playfulness of age, whoever would have thought? Concludes with the brilliant meditation, “Reflections on Whitman in Age,” including an illuminating Section of Duncan’s The Opening of the Field, followed by this comment: “I could go on quoting. Age wants no one to leave.” Certainly not the Figure of Outward. To savor. Farewell, Friend.

Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, by Alice Notley

(Wesleyan University Press, 2006) Grave of Light is a must-have-read-keep. Generous and demanding, Notley mines her trove with intellect and whim, keeping to a chronological spine, spinning in particles of her sequences, keeping things aboil. At her talk for the Study Abroad on the Bowery Visiting Writers Series at CUNY recently, she told some of her lost short stories, her earliest writing, and the ghosts behind those stories. This important book also tells the stories, and rereading is the way to hearing the voices and climbing with them into a radiant vehicle.

Fun Being Me: Poems, by Jack Wiler

(CavanKerry Press, Ltd., 2006) The joke, of course, is that Jack Wiler thinks his life is not fun so he invites the reader to have fun. The fun is no irony. It is the glint of real that sparks every line in his new book, in his face, in his decision to live it straight, not fancy. Wiler is one of our most underrated poets, and if you haven’t read him yet, here you go. In this book he even broaches his time with AIDS, a topic till now verboten for him. The bleakness, the searing truth of it, stops you cold. But, as he says about his brother (us) in “The Taste of Beer in Late Fall,” “He needs to know. / I need to tell.”

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-box: Uncollected Poems, etc. by Elizabeth Bishop

(Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2006) Edited by poetry maven and New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn, the word here is passion, and it’s Alice’s for poetry and for Bishop after Dickinson, and it’s Bishop’s for the essential. Together these two give you reason to live. The drafts/fragments are fascinating, the notes illuminating and clear. Any brouhaha about how poems, drafts, fragments, shards or splinters are best left in a box in a dust museum is beyond the point, so far beyond the point of what poetry is that it becomes a precious thing in a rear-view, you up front protecting. Poetry Needs No Protection. Reveal!

1719 Union St., by Alicia E. Vasquez

(Wasteland Press, 2006) Here is the slender first from a poet who was “discovered” when Steve Zeitlin, Director of City Lore, tracked down the author of a 9/11 poem found posted at Ground Zero. Vasquez remains a singular voice, straight from the street called Heart. An autodidact, Senorita Vasquez toes no line, ethic or aesthetic -- she says it like it is and it is: “often I’d bathe and dress her / her pride in my hands / to give back if she became lucid / ‘can’t stay long’ I told her / and left her in Miami / with those costly ineffective medicines / lined up in rows like soldiers on their way to a lost war.”

Tarnish and Masquerade, by Roger Bonair-Agard

(Cypher Books, Rattapallax Press, book+CD edition, 2007) Willie Perdomo’s Cypher Books continues its run of Best of the New with Roger Bonair-Agard’s excelsior Tarnish and Masquerade. A whirlwind whose performances are pure music and plain magic, Bonair-Agard’s first book is a carousel of language, physical, sonic, and pulse. The accompanying CD is well-made with touches of experimentation: here, Milica Paranosic adds organic sounds to “cane Brulee” that conclude with a real tropical downpour, Jammaster Celena Glenn beds three poems, and the CD concludes with a rousing live performance recorded in Munich.