When is the last time you bought a collection of poems—not because you were required to buy it for a class, but because you wanted it?

When is the last time you bought a collection of poems—not because you were required to buy it for a class, but because you wanted it?
"Poetry appeals to, and enlarges, our human capacity to know something deeply and, in that way, to love it."
"Finding time for poetry in the middle of our sometimes-frenzied lives can help us live more deliberately."
Poetry, to me, has always seemed like a second language. I can learn to read it, learn to interpret it, but though I enjoy finding and using creative turns of phrase and well-placed metaphors where I see them, I still naturally think of a table as a table first, rather than as, say, an “elevated platform for family gathering and nourishment.”
I’m haunted by the ghost of Li-Young Lee’s father. He’s there, in Lee’s poetry, tromping around upstairs or reading aloud so we can’t sleep. He lingers by the pear trees at the corner of our …
It is National Poetry Month and I want to celebrate the month with a little essay about the poet Richard Wilbur and his poem “October Maples.” At ninety-six years of age, Wilbur is probably our oldest, living, major American poet, and in my opinion, he has been the pre-eminent Christian poet writing in English in the latter half of the twentieth century.