In A Dark Time, The Eye Begins to See: A 2016 Poetry Preview

These are dark times; our feeds are filled with news of shootings as well as the hateful speech that always results. Every year, writing this preview, I think of how poetry is one of our surest consolations. It can't do much about the fear and violence running rampant in America right now, but in the books to be published in 2016 especially, poets are taking responsibility, speaking out, identifying themselves, speaking the truth. Honesty may be poetry's best gift in the coming year, as these writers and others say what needs to be said about guns, anger, racism, family, and how we can think and feel more precisely and truthfully about one another.

Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda

by Pablo Neruda and Forrest Gander

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Hardcover, 160 pages

Twenty out of the 21 poems that compose this volume were found among the late Nobel laureate's papers in 2014. Searingly translated by Forrest Gander, they are vintage Pablo Neruda, literally and figuratively — untitled meditations on all his favorite subjects: sex and sensuality, politics, the lone voice reaching out to the world for camaraderie and getting as close as a poet can to finding it. Neruda wrote the book — wrote many, in fact — on how the personal and the political are inextricably entwined. Reading these poems feels like stumbling on a lost chapter. Plus he makes poetry fans and general readers alike swoon with lines like "Crossing the sky I near/ the red ray of your hair."

Rea More: http://www.npr.org/2016/01/03/461504550/in-a-dark-time-the-eye-begins-to-see-a-2016-poetry-preview

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