"An Invitation to Poetry"

Courtesy of my local public library, I picked Pinsky & Dietz's anthology to read over the winter holidays and this book helps remind me why I write. If you've not seen "Invitation" it has a nice selection of poems introduced by readers who tell why the particular poem is important to them. These are "real world" readers, not only college professors or aspiring poets. The list includes students, clinical psychologists, and photographers just to name a few. I read the comments and hope that someday my poems will make connections like these with those who are generous enough to read them.

I read this poem when I found it in a bookstore on Commonwealth Avenue. I was trying to find a life for myself and trying to find love. The poem moved me because it was bleak. It acknowledged that there will be bitter winter burning. It still moves me.
--Joanna Wos, about Louise Bogan's The Crows

It as in the suburbs before the Women's Movement so I was often crazy alone. And then I read The Woman at the Washington Zoo. She knew!
--Myra Shapiro, about Randall Jarrell's The Woman at the Washington Zoo

The poem is better than a jury verdict, more ruthless than an execution, yet is compassionate to its core.
--Peggy Little, about Czelaw Milosz's You Who Wronged

I read it and feel like I have been passed a slip of paper with a beautiful secret written on it, and I have been part of the world that the poet shares--and this is good, because often I feel isolation in it. And the music of his words: somehow he manages to struggle, and to be stark or imaginative, and still sound like the kind of soft music we play as medicine for people who are hurting.
--Nicole Long on David Ferry's Seen through a Window