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A review by jmiae
American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time by Tracy K. Smith
4.0
I confess I am not a great reader of poetry. My favourite poet is John Keats, and while I believe he is a wonderful poet and I also love reading his marvellous letters, I'm aware that my selection is based off of a limited pool of contestants.
I am also not a great reader of American poetry. But this book was a gift, and I am well behind my reading challenge for the year. That was the premise for my initially picking up this collection.
Then two unrelated things happened that made reading this more meaningful than I could have anticipated. First, two days after I started reading this my grandmother passed away. Second, the same morning she passed, NPR's Life Kit podcast released an episode about coping with grief during the holidays that featured none other than Tracy K. Smith, the former Poet Laureate who also edited this collection.
And so I devoured the rest of the poems in this collection because it seemed like an outlet, and it was. Reading poems, so different from prose, is like reading a feeling. And this collection contains many poems about loss and sadness, so it was, somehow, miraculously, the perfect book at a perfect time for me personally.
I am also not a great reader of American poetry. But this book was a gift, and I am well behind my reading challenge for the year. That was the premise for my initially picking up this collection.
Then two unrelated things happened that made reading this more meaningful than I could have anticipated. First, two days after I started reading this my grandmother passed away. Second, the same morning she passed, NPR's Life Kit podcast released an episode about coping with grief during the holidays that featured none other than Tracy K. Smith, the former Poet Laureate who also edited this collection.
And so I devoured the rest of the poems in this collection because it seemed like an outlet, and it was. Reading poems, so different from prose, is like reading a feeling. And this collection contains many poems about loss and sadness, so it was, somehow, miraculously, the perfect book at a perfect time for me personally.