It is April again, bringing daffodils, cherry blossoms and National Poetry Month, an annual invitation to bring more poetry into your life. If you’re unsure about how to do that — or why you’d want to — I can think of no better way to find out than by listening to audiobooks of and about poetry.
In “Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World,” Irish poet, theologian and podcaster Pádraig Ó Tuama provides an irresistible seminar for poetry lovers and newcomers alike. Adapted from the popular podcast of the same name, what sets this anthology apart from most is the way Ó Tuama eases us into each poem with a brief personal reflection, followed by his unfailingly clear, expressive and unfussy narration of the poem itself, and then an astute, eye- and ear-opening discussion of what each poet is up to, and how they achieve their varied ends. Along the way, Ó Tuama and the eclectic range of international poets he shares make an irrefutable case for poetry’s power to enrich and enlarge our lives, while at the same time focusing our overtaxed attentions on key questions and profound truths. Without once invoking the shopworn term “mindfulness,” this stimulating collection makes an unusually effective tool for coming to one’s senses.
That same heightened awareness lies at the heart of traditional Japanese haiku. Listeners seeking to experience this as readers or writers will enjoy “Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku,” written and read by legendary writing instructor Natalie Goldberg. In this charming and candid account, Goldberg discusses her decadeslong fascination with haiku, the creation of which she describes as “Bare attention, no distractions, pure awareness. … the ordinary right in front of you is the realm of awakening.” Whether or not she attains this in her own writing, her sincere struggle to do so reveals as much about life as about haiku.
Listeners curious to take a more detailed look under the hood to see what makes a poem tick can follow this up with Brad Leithauser’s wonky, witty “Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry,” an in-depth explication of “rhyme schemes, metrical configurations, stanzaic forms, patterns of indentation and capitalization.” Listeners will appreciate Kevin R. Free’s affable, crystal clear narration of Leithauser’s irreverent and decidedly prosaic approach to poetry. Not that one needs to know an anapest from a trochee to enjoy the genre. Just pop in your earbuds, and listen.
Former Seattle Poet Laureate Anastacia-Reneé’s provocative and moving new collection “Side Notes from the Archivist” offers a master class in how a poet can express, encompass and evoke ambivalent feelings and complex realities with a startling immediacy that the “sad collected data” of prose rarely achieves. The deft tonal shifts of Anastacia-Reneé’s words and delivery amuse, disarm and devastate, juxtaposing the buffoonery of Tyler Perry’s “Madea” with the erasure of transgender lives; Black representation with its crass commodification; and fond childhood recollections of Philadelphia in the 1980s with the concurrent bombing of Black activists by police. For all the seriousness of its subject matter, this audiobook is a triumph of sardonic wit and compassion, culminating in three deliciously profane yoga poses guaranteed to bring deep relief for the tired and disgusted.
Great poetry recordings like these make you wonder why anyone would ever choose to read poetry in silence. The frank, sensual music of Sandra Cisneros’ recollections in “Woman Without Shame” feels inseparable from her own inspired, evocative bilingual performance. Less effusive but no less captivating is U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s straightforward, reflective reading of “The Hurting Kind.” The poet holds her recollections and observations up and turns them in the light, gently shifting our own perspective on the world and our place in it.
Narrators David Shih and Nancy Wu employ a similar restraint in reading the “Selected Poems” of the great 20th-century Chinese poet Ai Qing, in a new translation by Robert Dorsett. It is hard to imagine getting a more concentrated window on the fears, hopes and longings of modern China than the epic sweep that is distilled into under two hours’ listening. One of my own favorite poets is Campbell McGrath, whose “Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems” tumbles out of the earbuds in the author’s untutored enthusiastic telling, a freewheeling ramble through American appetites and satisfactions, too much and never quite enough, searching and striving, lost and found. Just like McGrath’s brimming verbal smorgasbords, these and so many other audiobooks teem with an endless variety of poetic voices, all calling out to us with their own truth.
