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RHYME’S ROOMS: Architecture of Poetry, by Brad Leithauser. (Knopf, $30.) In his manual of poetic techniques, which is also a defense of form, the veteran poet and prominent traditionalist offers sections on meter, rhyme, stanzas, and the like to explain how verse works and why we should care. “Leithauser’s approach is empirical rather than procedural; This book is about a how-rather than a how,” writes David Orr in his review. “Along the way we read individual poems and poetic influences, which are enjoyable, albeit idiosyncratic at times.”
BEST BARBARIAN: Poems, by Roger Reeves. (Norton, $26.95.) Reeves’ terrific second collection sets out to fuse the Western literary canon with its omissions and repressions, resurrecting an eclectic cast of characters from Sappho to James Baldwin, and asking the vital but unanswerable question: “What disaster will I bring to my daughter? “In the dexterous hands of Reeves,” writes Sandra Simonds in her review, “the environment was centralized as a way to subvert the hierarchies of literature. … What I find most impressive about this collection is the way fatherhood frames Reeves’ perception of the future and his reworking of the past. His daughter becomes a generator for heaven, the underworld, utopia and dystopia. What will he leave behind for him?”
KEATS: A Short Life in Nine Poems and an Inscription, by Lucasta Miller. (Knopf, $32.50.) By structuring his tribute to the great Romantic poet around nine specific poems (and an epitaph) and taking him as a repetitive, candid first-person, Miller evades academic conventions while evoking the volatile, diverse genius of the subject without making it stupid. biography. “It helps the reader perceive the real, living, 25-year-old man,” writes Robert Pinsky in his review. “Miller’s short, conversational (sometimes babble) book, with its literal organization based on the poet’s writing, makes poetry the starting point, out of thousands of books, the fictitious communication between John Keats and us may be a fitting document for his future. readers.”
FLIGHT AND METAMORPHOSIS: Poems, by Nelly Sachs. Translated by Joshua Weiner. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30.) Sachs, a German Jew who fled the Nazis and won the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, is known as a Holocaust poet, but this new translation of his post-war collection shows that his later work is also full of mystery and depth. “Simultaneously hermetic and permeable, open geographical, temporal, and detached from narrative context, these poems explore rather than report,” writes Daisy Fried in her review. “These are visionless visions, squinting prophecies. It will confuse readers accustomed to Anglo-American lyric epiphany – but that’s the point, and a good reason to read Sachs.”
CANOPY, by Linda Gregerson. (Eco, fabric, $25.99; paper, $16.99.) In his elective seventh collection, the mindful, weathered, erudite Michigan poet patiently and succinctly seeks to support our aging bodies, battered ecosystems, and unforgettable conversational traditions alongside his own Midwestern immigrant heritage. “Other poets of lamentation, other poets of echo disaster, adore sensory details or go after complex language for chaotic times,” Stephanie Burt writes in her review. “Gregerson instead sets up clear arguments, even comparisons, in complex sentences designed to connect us to his thoughtful conclusions. He is a poet of wisdom, maturity, catchy advice, a poet who looks into history and sometimes finds help there.”
VENICE, Ange Mlinko’s photo. (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $26.) Mlinko’s poems are formal and highly polished – but they are also brutal, energetic, lively, and depravedly Catholic in their tropes, with nightmarish overtones of everyday events haunted by political and environmental concerns. “In Mlinko’s universe, the small, humble things often symbolize the vast and our locally targeted, often haphazardly conveyed interpretations — We don’t have much time, there is still damage – “Whether it’s about love, national politics, or European holidays, the result seems the same: Reality tends to frustrate our desires and gives us only the pure objects we desire. leaves his memories.”
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