BIRTHDAY POETRY BOOKS!

Dear Son,

Today is the day I've long known as my birthday (the hidden story a different story).  So, today, I gave my beleaguered, multi-tasking self the gift of time, in this case, one hour.  I went to one of my favorite bookstores, Main Street Books in St. Helena.  It's a mostly-used bookstore in the space of a closet.  Poetry takes up two shelves.  But since poetry takes up 1-2 shelves in bookstores ten times or more the size of Main Street Books, that's a commitment.  My gift to moiself was to peruse every book on the two poetry shelves (shown above) and acquire those whose poems clamored for my poetry library.

It's a good constraint--a way to look at poets whose names I might have glossed over in the past because I didn't know their work or, ahem, because I'd heard of their work.  Son, we should always be open-minded as regards books -- we never can fully anticipate which books will have the ability to engage our minds.

Anyway, as I had hoped, I surprised myself. I ended up with five books.  I'd heard of Jane Kenyon and David Ignatow, of course, but wouldn't have gone out of my way to explore their works -- or at least the two books carried by the bookstore -- were it not for my directive to myself.  The other three poets were not known previously to me.  So, here are the five books:

AGAINST THE EVIDENCE: SELECTED POEMS 1934-1994 by David Ignatow 

A FORM OF OPTIMISM by Roy Jacobstein 

CONSTANCE: POEMS by Jane Kenyon 

THE COUNTRY I REMEMBER by David Mason 

SOMETHING PERMANENT, photographs by Walker Evans and poetry by Cynthia Rylant

A very satisfying conclusion to my birthday hour.  Plus it helped me support an indie bookstore, always a good apple to bite.  Son, please join me in welcoming these books to our library!

Love,
Your Poet-Mom