April is the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot said, but it’s also National Poetry Month — the perfect reason to stay inside and catch up on good poetry!

Maybe you’re uninitiated and don’t know where to start, or maybe you just want an excuse to retread a familiar favorite. Regardless, here are four collections to get your Poetry Month on.

“The Wild Iris” by Louise Glück

“At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” writes Louise Glück in the titular poem of “The Wild Iris.” 

Glück is easily one of the most accomplished living poets in the U.S., having won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. “The Wild Iris,” a favorite of many poets, was her sixth full length collection, published in 1992. It won her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993.

The poem “The Wild Iris” describes the cycle of birth and death from the perspective of a flower with startlingly vivid imagery. The rest of the book’s poems showcase Glück’s distinctive poetic voice, quite authoritative, as she explores her feelings and questions of survival and human nature. She begins the poem “The Red Poppy”:

“The great thing

is not having

a mind. Feelings:

oh, I have those; they

govern me.”

The punctuation, enjambment and the interjection “oh” interrupt the rhythm of the thought in a dramatic fashion. It’s an intimate collection, as though Glück were handing her shattered heart straight to the reader. 

“Dream Work” by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver, who passed away in 2019, was not only a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award but also one of America’s best-selling poets. Her 1986 collection “Dream Work” includes what is perhaps the internet’s best beloved poem: “Wild Geese.” She writes:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.”

Oliver speaks directly to the reader in her commanding but reassuring voice, like a wise friend. The rest of the collection is full of similarly meaningful and inspiring affirmations. It’s the perfect poem to read to your loved ones, to read to yourself and commit to memory. A reminder to take care of oneself in a world that fatigues us.

“The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe” by Laura Gilpin

Laura Gilpin only published one collection of poetry during her lifetime. The book, 1977’s “The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe,” won the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. Readers might recognize the widely shared poem “Two-headed Calf.” It delivers the reader with such a romantically rendered moment, unearthing stunning beauty from an otherwise somber scene at dusk.

Gilpin accomplishes something similar in the poem “Watching my Mother Sleep”:

“Hospitals at night

are such deceptive places

and as I watch her sleep

in this strange green light

she looks so young.”
Gilpin thoughtfully juxtaposes death with youth and birth. Her use of contrasting images is nuanced and heartfelt, typical of her striking ability to see beauty in unexpected places.

“The Carrying” by Ada Limón

Ada Limón has the distinction of being the current Poet Laureate of the U.S. “The Carrying,” her fifth collection from 2018, features one of her most popular poems: “What I Didn’t Know Before.” The poem unexpectedly compares falling in love to the birth of a horse.

Limón triumphs in constructing creative metaphors, honing in on specific moments from her own life to reveal greater meaning to her readers.
In the poem “The Raincoat,” Limón recalls how her mother would drive her 45 minutes to physical therapy to treat her crooked spine. Now grown up and driving herself, she writes:

“… I saw a mom take her raincoat off

and give it to her young daughter when

a storm took over the afternoon. My god,

I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her

raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel

that I never got wet.”

Limón’s poems are personal, heavy but hopeful, a reflection on grief, love and motherhood that touches the heart.

Poetry helps us notice. It helps us make sense. Live for a moment, however brief, in the poetry of someone else, and discover some new, beautiful way of seeing the world.