A Poetry Month Compendium (or, spring cleaning for bibliophiles)
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
April 16, 2026
by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty, Associate Programs Director
Like many of you, I have the happy problem of too many books I want to read piling up on my bedside table, the desk in my office, the floor of my study, the table next to the chair where I like to read in the afternoon . . . you get the picture. And this is despite my valiant attempt in August to make a dent in the piles with the Sealey Challenge! However, National Poetry Month challenges me anew with a commitment to read more poetry, and so I’ve sorted and restacked a pile to indulge in this month.
As of this writing the first week of April, I’ve already enjoyed Eavan Boland’s posthumous collection The Historians. I’ve admired Boland’s work for a long time as I’ve discovered it in anthologies but have not read a complete, single volume. Published just months after her death in 2020, this final collection includes the long poem “Our Future Will Become the Past of Other Women” commissioned to mark the 2018 centennial of women’s suffrage in Ireland. Her lines in memory of the Irish women
Who struggled and prevailed,
For whose sake we choose
These things from that date
To honour, to remember and to celebrate
serve as a signature theme for this collection (if not much of Boland’s work) that recovers the stories of these brave women from Irish history as well as Boland’s own familial history.
Boland is not, however, the only Irish poet that has engaged me in the last year. A recent trip to London and southwest England led me to seek out Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle, the title of which references the two principal lines of the London Underground, which also serve as a governing metaphor for the book’s seamless travelling between the living and the dead, the poet’s past and present. Perhaps unexpectedly for Heaney, the book includes a sequence of prose poems titled “Found Prose” as well as poems in formally constrained quatrains and couplets. The short sonnet sequence “The Tollund Man in Springtime” finds Heaney returning to the Bog People series he first explored in his 1975 collection North.
My interest in poets from the greater English-speaking world had me searching for books in Notting Hill and Oxford, where I browsed work by Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage, the current Poet Laureate of the UK. I discovered his 2017 collection The Unaccompanied in a bookstore in Oxford and upon returning home ordered his 2007 translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a side-by-side verse translation that also includes Armitage’s marvelous brief introduction to Middle English with its echoes of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.
Also from the greater English-speaking world, I’m really looking forward to House of Lords and Commons, by Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson. A multiple prize winner, including the Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Hutchinson travels in this collection across his Jamaican homeland but, as described, “at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.” I am thrilled to encounter another poet using the tools of history and documentation as part of a larger conversation about humanity, and I suspect Hutchinson will be a poet whose work I seek out further.
Closer to home, I am happy to have the space and time to enjoy Keith S. Wilson’s Games for Children (Milkweed, 2025), a winner of the 2024 National Poetry Series. I count myself lucky to have Keith as a colleague at Spalding. This new collection extends his expansive approach to the poem on the page with its graphic innovations and brave interpretations of history and culture.
Live readings are a particular temptation for the book lover, and poet Peter Gizzi’s terrific keynote reading in February at the University of Louisville’s Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 was a natural opportunity to get a copy of his most recent book, Fierce Elegy. A poet whose work I did not know at all, he intrigues me with his short-lined lyrics and the prose poem sequence “Of Air.” The Judges’ Citation notes, “Sometime eschewing syntax for song, sometimes fractured by loss into a language that sobs and stutters, each poem could be an ars poetica.”
Reviews provide another source for good reads, and I’m constantly impressed with the reviews of new work our Naslund-Mann students contribute to this journal. Such a case is Melissa Shepherd’s insightful and engaging Spring 2025 review of Dianne Seuss’s Modern Poetry, in which she argues, “Music is the love language of the book,” and which sold the book for me. I’m very interested in what this follow-up to the blockbuster 2022 Pulitzer-Prize winning frank: sonnets will offer.
Finally, I’ll also be giving Paula Bohince’s A Violence a second reading as I begin work on a planned review for this journal. Bohince is a poet I’ve admired for a long time. Her debut collection, Incident at Bayonet Woods, was a revelation, and in reviewing her sophomore book, The Children, I noted, “The unexpected bravery of the book in its seeing of the world and our small place in it, and the breathtaking beauty of images in poem after poem suggests, after all, we do not need to fear the dark and its pain.” Bohince frequently engages with a rural landscape in a kind of dark eco-poetry. This new collection, with its echoes of PTSD and how the body remembers it, promises the same beautiful darkness.
Interested in learning more about these poets or sharing your impressions with me? Here’s a brief bibliography with links to publishers:
Armitage, Simon, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Norton, 2007, and The Unaccompanied. Faber and Faber, 2017
Bohince, Paula. A Violence. Princeton UP, 2025
Boland, Eavan. The Historians. Carcanet, 2020
Gizzi, Peter. Fierce Elegy. Wesleyan UP, 2023
Heaney, Seamus. District and Circle. Faber and Faber, 2006
Hutchison, Ishion. House of Lords and Commons. Farrah, Strauss, and Giroux, 2016
Seuss, Dianne. Modern Poetry. Graywolf, 2024
Wilson, Keith S. Games for Children. Milkweed, 2025
Or, order them all from the Naslund-Mann School’s Bookshop site: https://bookshop.org/shop/spaldingschoolofwriting
I’m at ledwards02@spalding.edu if you’d like to get in touch.
Lynnell Edwards is poetry faculty and Associate Programs Director for the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. The author of six books of poetry, her most recent collection is The Bearable Slant of Light (Red Hen Press, 2024). More about her other writing, including reviews and essays, at lynnelledwards.com.