Off The Shelf: Fools for poetry

April is National Poetry Month and the North Olympic Library System can help you celebrate!

April is National Poetry Month and the North Olympic Library System can help you celebrate!

To get started, check out the poetry display later this month at the Sequim Library and take a gander at these recommended titles:

For the young at heart, “Once I Ate a Pie” by Patricia MacLachlan and Emily MacLachlan Charest pleases the eye with paintings by Katy Schneider and such verse as, “Gus herds his people like sheep./Abby loves borrowing slippers./ And once, Mr. Beefy ate a pie.” And one more: “If something is closed, I open it./If it is perfect, I tear it apart./I love my work./I love my nose.”

Grace Nicholls, Thomas Hardy, Benjamin Zephaniah and others contributed to “All the Wild Wonders: Poems of Our Earth,” a book “great for sharing, it will grab conservationists with both the warnings and the hope.” (Booklist review)

“Enormous Smallness” by Matthew Burgess playfully tells the life story of E.E. Cummings alongside his poems — a joy to read aloud.

For fiction about poets, or characters who wish they were poets, check out “The Sky Over Lima” by Juan Gómez Bárcena. Novelist Helen Oyememi describes it thus: “A tale with the subtlest of stings in it, dark wit and telescopic perspective aplenty … I’ll be thinking of these characters, what they longed to create and what they managed to despoil, for a long time.”

Poet Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir of marriage and the sudden death of her husband, “The Light of the World,” is a National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist. Jeannette Walls describes it as “a brave and beautiful book about love and loss — the deep pain that comes with such a loss, and the redemptive realization that such pain is a small price to pay for such a love.”

Lastly, look for Jane Hirshfield’s collection “The Beauty.” According to Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman, “Hirshfield’s contemplative acuity, erudite imagination and exceptional fluency in image and language make for a beautifully agile and sage volume.”

Want more poetry? This spring NOLS once again is partnering with Olympic National Park to offer a third season of Poetry Walks. This year’s program began April 1 and continues until May 31, featuring inspiring poetry along five dazzling trails in Olympic National Park. During Poetry Walks, poems will be placed on signs along the following park trails: the Hall of Mosses Trail, the Living Forest Trail, the Madison Creek Falls Trails, the Peabody Creek Trail and Spruce Railroad Trail. To learn more, visit www.nols.org.


More info

For additional poetry resources — and resources of all kinds — stop in and visit the Sequim Library at 630 N. Sequim Ave., get in touch with your friendly library staff by calling 683-1161, send an email to Sequim@nols.org or visit the Library website at www.nols.org.

 

Mary Coté is a customer service specialist at Sequim and Port Angeles libraries.