April is National Poetry Month, so David Starkey, former Santa Barbara Poet Laureate and current Indy book reviewer, has for the third year in a row undertaken the daunting task of reading and summarizing 30 books of poetry — one for each day of the month. Below are the results of his endeavor.
Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems, 1950-2012: The poetic antidote to Trumpism was written long before the current president took office. Rich’s work is complex and driven and couldn’t be more relevant, as in this passage from “Trying to Talk with a Man,” where she confronts a scientist at a bomb testing site and realizes he is “talking of the danger / as if it were not ourselves / as if we were testing anything else.”
Rita Dove, Collected Poems, 1974-2004: Dove may be best known for writing about the struggles faced by African Americans, but this comprehensive gathering of mostly short poems from the first 30 years of her career shows her to be interested in everything from Frida Kahlo to grape sherbet to math flash cards. “If you feel strange,” she writes, “strange things will happen to you.”