Each day, public radio listeners across America tune in to The Writer's Almanac. They want to hear Garrison Keillor read them a poem. He does—and it's invariably a good poem.The title Good Poems comes from common literary parlance. For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having written a good poem. Somebody else can worry about greatness. Mary Oliver's "The Wild Geese" is a good poem, and so is James Wright's "A Blessing." Regular people love these poems. They read them aloud at weddings; they send them to their friends and relatives by email.
This new anthology is for anyone who loves poetry, whether they know it or not. It includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. Some are classics by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost. Some are contemporary works by Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. Some are from The Writer's Almanac, some are newly recorded by Keillor, and some are read by the poets themselves. Some are wise, some are funny, some are soothing or heartwarming. All were chosen for their wit, their frankness, their passion, and in Keillor's words, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 A.M."