Good poems for hard times

Introduction

Kindness To Snails:

Break of day / Galway Kinnell

Happiness / Raymond Carver

This morning / Jane Kenyon

Monks of St John's file in for prayer / Kilian McDonnell

Job / William Baer

Or death and December / George Garrett

Sonnet: Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight / Gavin Ewart

Little horse is newly1Y / EE cummings

Poem for Emily / Miller Williams

For a five-year old / Fleur Adcock

For my daughter in reply to a question / David Ignatow

Goose / Muriel Spark

Starting the Subaru at five below / Stuart Kestenbaum

Day bath / Debra Spencer

Such As It Is More Or Less:

Dialogue of watching / Kenneth Rexroth

Birthday / WS Merwin

Thoughts in a garden / Andrew Marvell

Spring / Mary Oliver

Unharvested / Robert Frost

State of the economy / Louis Jenkins

At the arraignment / Debra Spencer

Song of myself (from) / Walt Whitman

Ice storm / Jane Kenyon

Passengers / Billy Collins

Summer-camp bus pulls away from the curb / Sharon Olds

You can take it with you / Josephine Jacobsen

To David, about his education / Howard Nemerov

Invitation / Carl Dennis

Calling him back from layoff / Bob Hicok

Working in the rain / Robert Morgan

My father's lunch / Erica Funkhouser

This Lust Of Tenderness:

Happiest day / Linda Pastan

After dark vapours have oppressed our plains' / John Keats

Children's hospital, emergency room / Gregory Djanikian

Lonely-weds know / Leah Furnas

In answer to your query / Naomi Lazard

Toast / Leonard Nathan

Detail waiting for a train / Stanley Plumly

September twelfth, 2001 / XJ Kennedy

Altar / Charles Simic

Sonnet No-6: Dearest, I never knew such loving / Hayden Carruth

There comes the strangest moment / Kate Light

Snowflake / William Baer

Somewhere I'll find you / Phebe Hanson

Feasting / Elizabeth W Garber

Song / WH Auden

Yes / Catherine Doty

Dalliance of the eagles / Walt Whitman

After love / Maxine Kumin

Sonnet CVI: When in the chronicle of wasted time / William Shakespeare

Deliberate Obfuscation:

Spiral notebook / Ted Kooser

What's in my journal / William Stafford

Why I take good care of my Macintosh / Gary Snyder

Ode to my 1977 Toyota / Barbara Hamby

Internal exile / Richard Cecil

Burma-shave / Traditional

Carnation milk / Anonymous

Brief lecture on door closers / Clemens Starck

Sonnet XII: Why are we by all creatures waited on? / John Donne

Angels / Maurya Simon

Passing through a small town / David Shumate

In Paris with you / James Fenton

Wedding poem for Schele and Phil / Bill Holm

Sound Of A Car:

Seven deadly sins / Virginia Hamilton Adair

Teaching a child the art of confession / David Shumate

Physics / Heather McHugh

Things / Lisel Mueller

Any prince to any princess / Adrian Henri

Courage that my mother had / Edna St Vincent Millay

Please Mrs Butler / Allan Ahlberg

To a frustrated poet / RJ Ellmann

Lesson of the moth / Don Marquis

Disappointment / Tony Hoagland

Cure / Ginger Andrews

Upon hearing about the suicide of the daughter of friends / Jo McDougall

Here It Comes:

Con job / Charles Bukowski

Fareweel to A our Scottish fame / Robert Burns

Easter morning / Jim Harrison

Million young workmen, 1915 / Carl Sandburg

College colonel / Herman Melville

Ordinary life / Barbara Crooker

To fight aloud, is very brave / Emily Dickinson

Analysis of baseball / May Swenson

Ode to American English / Barbara Hamby

High water mark / David Shumate

After school on ordinary days / Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Snow in the suburbs / Thomas Hardy

Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion

Happiness / Michael Van Walleghen

Tender buttons (from) / Gertrude Stein

Classic ballroom dances / Charles Simic

Theater / William Greenway

Ode on the whole duty of parents / Frances Cornford

Whatever Happens:

Benefits of ignorance / Hal Sirowitz

Bunthorne's song / WS Gilbert

Rules of evidence / Lee Robinson

Courtesy / Hilaire Belloc

What the uneducated old woman told me / Christopher Reid

Proverbs of hell / William Blake

To a daughter leaving home / Linda Pastan

No longer a teenager / Gerald Locklin

Prayer / Galway Kinnell

Minnesota Thanksgiving / John Berryman

Berryman / WS Merwin

Mother, in love at sixty / Susanna Styve

My agent says / RS Gwynn

Afraid so / Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Yak / Hilaire Belloc

High plains farming / William Notter

Fish / Elizabeth Bishop

Future / Wesley McNair

Riveted / Robyn Sarah

All the time / May Swenson

My husband discovers poetry / Diane Lockward

Poet's occasional alternative / Grace Paley

Unsaid / Stephen Dunn

Snapshot of a lump / Kelli Russell Agodon

Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness / John Donne

Last days / Donald Hall

Let It Spill:

Thelonious monk / Stephen Dobyns

Discovery of sex / Debra Spencer

Lawyer / Carl Sandburg

Prodigal son's brother / Steve Kowit

Calling your father / Robert Bly

Al and Beth / Louis Simpson

Meeting / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Nothing is lost / Noel Coward

Planet on the table / Wallace Stevens

It is raining on the house of Anne Frank / Linda Pastan

Sunlight on the garden / Louis MacNeice

Too sweet / Charles Bukowski

For my sister, emigrating / Wendy Cope

Three kings / Muriel Spark

Not only the Eskimos / Lisel Mueller

Where go the boats / Robert Louis Stevenson

Parade / Billy Collins

My cup / Robert Friend

Affirmation / Donald Hall

Singing voice / Kenneth Rexroth

Since you asked / Lawrence Raab

Inviting a friend to supper / Ben Jonson

Love cook / Ron Padgett

Soda crackers / Raymond Carver

That silent evening / Galway Kinnell

This is how memory works / Patricia Hampl

Purpose of time is to prevent everything from happening at once / XJ Kennedy

I Feel Our Kinship:

Death mask / Edward Field

That's the sum of it / David Ignatow

Suck it up / Paul Zimmer

Day the tree fell down / Jack LaZebnik

White Autumn / Robert Morgan

Naked / Jennifer Michael Hecht

Slow children at play / Cecilia Woloch

Driving to town late to mail a letter / Robert Bly

My brother's in Wyoming / Gary Young

My brother / Denver Butson

Still life / Carl Sandburg

Changing light / Lawrence Ferlinghetti

At the fish-houses / Elizabeth Bishop

Man in Maine / Philip Booth

War in the air / Howard Nemerov

In the middle / Barbara Crooker

Are you tired of me, my darling? / Traditional

On a night of snow / Elizabeth Coatsworth

Closing in on the harvest / Leo Dangel

Reconciliation / Walt Whitman

Tie the strings to my life, my lord / Emily Dickinson

Last waltz / Alden Nowlan

Rye whiskey / Traditional

Let old Nellie stay / Traditional

In praise of my bed / Meredith Holmes

Poem for the family / Susan Cataldo

In bed with a book / Mona Van Duyn

My father gets up in the middle of the night to watch an old movie / Dennis Trudell

Prayer in the prospect of death / Robert Burns

Diner / Louis Jenkins

When death comes / Mary Oliver

At my funeral / Willis Barnstone

Wish to be generous (The) / Wendell Berry

Last poem / Ted Berrigan

Simpler Than I Could Find Words For:

Just now / WS Merwin

Psalm 51

Dawn revisited / Rita Dove

Crossing the bar / Alfred Lord Tennyson

Morning swim / Maxine Kumin

Biographies

Author index

Title index.