More on: Poetry

Over the past decade, poet Jean Hollander and her husband, Dante scholar Robert Hollander, have produced an acclaimed translation of the Divine Comedy, drawing Robert’s scholarship and Jean’s poetic sense. Joan Acocella of The New Yorker called their translation “beautiful…more idiomatic than any other English version I know,” and credited Jean’s ear with allowing the…

Bobby C. Rogers has an uncanny ability to wring what is profound and surprising from what appears humble and ordinary. In the words of Andrew Hudgins, he is “a near mystic of the domestic.” A story about a young couple moving into a new house and watching the neglected garden come to life as seasons…

Alison Pelegrin is a citizen of Louisiana through and through, and her poems read like love songs to the place. In her verse, which effortlessly marries formal elements with natural speaking rhythm, she explores the silty, dangerous landscape of her home state, and the resilient nature of community life on vulnerable, ever-shifting ground. Her work…

Part psychologist, part mystic, in her poems Lisa Russ Spaar offers a beautiful and compelling portrait of the mind at prayer. An ongoing series of poems explores the imagined insomnia of various historic and literary figures, from Thomas Merton and Hildegard von Bingen to Virginia Woolf and Franz Mesmer—using sleeplessness as a way of investigating,…

Dana Gioia is one of those rare people who really deserve to be called a “national treasure.” Poet, critic, intellectual, businessman, arts activist, tireless supporter of writers in need of support (both living and dead)—he has nurtured the life of the imagination as an urgent public good in myriad ways. First and foremost, of course,…

American history as conceived by Marilyn Nelson is the inside-out, last-shall-be-first version. She inhabits the voices of the overlooked and disenfranchised and shines light into forgotten corners that reveal essential truths about the whole. In her collection Fortune’s Bones, she channels the voice of a real-life eighteenth-century slave whose skeleton, after his death, was boiled…

Poet Fleda Brown is curious about language—in particular, about the slippery exchange between words and the things they stand for. Some writers of the last century had given up on the association between signifier and signified as arbitrary and no longer worthy of serious thought—but Brown is more circumspect, and more interested, with a great…

Anya Silver’s poetry belongs to the ancient tradition of meditation on the name of God—not as a way of containing and owning God, but as a way of entering into communion. Her work is pervaded by a longing for the divine that is at once specifically located in small, ordinary things, and deeply mystical. Alive…

In an age of smallness, poet Brett Foster is willing for the mind to be large. A poet as well as professor of Renaissance literature (at Wheaton; his PhD is from Yale), he rejects the modern habit of subdividing human intellectual activity into specialized, isolated compartments—as if the mind were a modern university where no…

Jeff Gundy is a poet of proportion. With precise imagery, fluid, simple language, and gentle humor, he maps the place of the tiny human self in the vast universe. His conclusion? We are less significant than we think—and, at the same time, infinitely more so. His poetry and essays are rooted in the Mennonite tradition,…