As National Poetry Month comes to a close, 2 new retrospectives to savor

With National Poetry Month comes spring flowers and some of the year's biggest poetry publications. And as April wraps up, we wanted to bring you two of our favorites — retrospective collections from two of the best poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.

The typical speaker of a Howe poem is a woman who seems much like Marie Howe, even when she is speaking through the voice of the biblical Mary, as she does in:"I was driven toward desire by desire." She is serious except when she's funny, though she's rarely laugh out loud funny — it's more of a kind of internal laughter, either like blossoming light or paper rustling in one's chest.

. In between, and after, she was always well regarded by the mainstream poetry establishment, winning most of the prizes available to an American poet. Valentine writes about everything — love, death, sex, the roiling political situations of the last half-century — with simultaneous candor and mystery:"I have been so far, so deep, so cold, so much," she says prophetically in an early poem. She asserts that poetry can be made almost entirely through suggestion, that the poet must trust the secret links between one word and another, and trust that the reader will be willing to travel with the poet along those underground currents.

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