This was a year in which poetry really had to do its fine work – and it did. These are the poems that most soothed and stirred me most in the latter half of 2020.

‘Short talk on the Mona Lisa’ by Anne Carson

Every day he poured his question into her, as / you pour water from one vessel into another, / and it poured back.

Anne Carson burst onto the international poetry scene in 1987 with her long poem ‘Kinds of Water’ . Since then she has published numerous books of poetry, including Float (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Red Doc> (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013); The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Autobiography of Red (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); and Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992).

‘Japanese Maple’ by Clive James

So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls / On that small tree / And saturates your brick back garden walls, / So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls / Ever more lavish as the dusk descends

Clive James wrote several books of poetry — a complete edition, called The Book of My Enemy, was published in Britain in 2003. Village Voice critic Abigail Deutsch noted, ‘James’s artistry lies in his ability to seem both casual and careful: He observes an imperfect world with acerbic off-handedness, often setting his informal voice within formal verse.’ He died in November 2019.

‘Like a Prisoner of Soft Words’ by C. D. Wright

By the time we reach the restaurant one of us is angry. / Here a door gives in to a courtyard / overlooking a ruined pool. / We suspect someone has followed one or the other of us. / We touch the spot on our shirt where the ink has seeped.

C.D. Wright was born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the daughter of a judge and a court reporter. She published over a dozen books. As poet and critic Joel Brouwer asserts, ‘Wright belongs to a school of exactly one.’ Wright said, ‘Poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.’ In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

‘Major to Minor’ by Andrea Cohen

the key to the city / not quite fitting, the / epiphany of twin / beds where there /

was one – like two / icebergs no July / knows what / to do with.

Andrea Cohen is the author of six poetry collections and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Threepenny Review, Poetry magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. She directs the Writers House at Merrimack College and the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

‘’Tis Morning Makes Mother a Killer’ by Wanda Coleman

her paycheck spread too thin across the bread of / weeks; too much gristle and bone and not enough / blood … it is the sun illuminating cobwebs / that strips her of her haunted beauty; reveals / the hag at her desperate hour / children beware

Wanda Coleman was awarded the prestigious 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Bathwater Wine from the American Academy of Poets, becoming the first African-American woman to ever win the prize, and was a bronze-medal finalist for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry for Mercurochrome. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is the first new collection of her work since her death in 2013.

‘Scribe’ by Paul Auster

It was written. / A flower / falls from his eye / and blooms in a stranger’s mouth.

Paul Auster (1947- ) is a novelist, essayist, translator, and poet whose complex mystery novels are often concerned with the search for identity and personal meaning. A graduate of Columbia University, he currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Michael Palmer says, ‘Auster’s is a poetry of extreme lyric condensation.’

‘Apartment Living’ by Meghan O’Rourke

Life is a needle. And now it pricks you: / the silver light in which you realize / your attempts at decadence / tire the earth and tire you. The etymology /

Meghan O’Rourke, a former editor at the New Yorker, is the author of the poetry collections Halflife and Once, and the memoir The Long Goodbye.

‘State Bird’ by Ada Limón

But, love, I’ll concede this: / whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird, / the loud, obvious blur of song people point to / when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.

Ada Limón is the author of Lucky Wreck (2006), This Big Fake World (2006), Sharks in the Rivers (2010), and Bright Dead Things (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award.

‘Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees’ by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Which is to say that I miss / the mind I had when I had / my mother. I own what is yet. … I still carry a faded slip of paper / where she once wrote a word / with a pencil & crossed it out.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. Her recent collection of poetry and photography is Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton). Griffiths is a recipient of fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, and Yaddo. Her literary and visual work has appeared widely, including The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Guernica, Tin House, and many others. Griffiths lives in New York City.

‘A Plenitude’ by Karen Solie

And all identified after the fact / but for the banks of wild roses, the poppies you loved / parked like an ambulance by the barley field.

Karen Solie is an award-winning poet born in Moose Jaw and who grew up in southwest Saskatchewan, Canada. She is the author of poetry collections including Short Haul Engine, Pigeon, and The Living Option. She is an associate director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio program, and lives in Toronto.

‘Waking After the Surgery’ by Leila Chatti

And just like that, I was whole again, // seam like a drawing of an eyelid closed, /

gauze resting atop it like a bed // of snow laid quietly in the night

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she is a Provost Fellow. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

‘October’ by Louise Glück

1. Is it winter again, is it cold again, / didn’t Frank just slip on the ice, / didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted // didn’t the night end, / didn’t the melting ice /

flood the narrow gutters

Louise Glück is the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. She is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a collection of essays. Her many awards include the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems: 1962-2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

‘Pimp my ride’ by Jennifer L. Knox

Probability, like time, is its own dimension. / The ’86 Chevy Suburban laced by rust, / pocked with bird poop, antenna wiggling / in its Bondo-clogged hole is only one way / the story begins.

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of Crushing It (Copper Canyon, forthcoming 2020), as well as the collections Days of Shame and Failure (2015), The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway (2010), Drunk by Noon (2007), and A Gringo Like Me (2007), all published by Bloof Books. She currently teaches at Iowa State University and is the proprietor of a small herb and spice company called Saltlickers.

‘Another View’ by Jennifer Compton

in the kitchen? / But she tinkers on. I am imagining / a foldaway canvas stool. / A palette. / Today the very day / the jacaranda begins to slough / her purple mantle.

Jennifer Compton lives in Melbourne and is a poet and playwright who also writes prose.

‘The Mercy’ by Philip Levine

A nine-year-old girl travels / all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. / She learns that mercy is something you can eat / again and again while the juice spills over / your chin, you can wipe it away with the back / of your hands and you can never get enough.

Philip Levine  was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995 for his collection The Simple Truth. Other collections include On the Edge (1963), They Feed They Lion (1972), Ashes (1979; winner of a National Book Award), and A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988). Levine, inspired by a visit to Barcelona, wrote the poems of The Names of the Lost (1976) in honour of the loyalists who fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). He died in 2015, at 87.

‘Reply to Wang Wei’ by Charles Wright

The dream of reclusive life, a strict, essential solitude, / Is a younger hermit’s dream. /

Tuesday, five days till winter, a cold, steady rain. / White hair, white heart. The time’s upon us and no exit / East of the lotus leaves. // No exit, you said, and a cold, steady rain. / Indeed.

Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was the 50th U.S. Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2015, and his poetry collections include Country Music, Black Zodiac, Chickamauga, and Caribou.

‘A Lightened Life’ by John Updike

this morning I couldn’t do the computer code / for the accent grave in fin-de-siècle, one / of my favourite words. What’s up? What’s left of me?

John Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than 20 novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children’s books during his career. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954.

‘Memory, Flooding Back’ by Jeremy Michael Clark

When the water / seeped through the window, I felt // so confused. How like a child to think / the house had started to cry.

Jeremy Michael Clark is from Louisville, Kentucky. He is the author of the chapbook Some Blues I Know by Name, and his first full-length collection, The Trouble with Light, is forthcoming from Ledge Mule Press. Currently, he is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, and lives in Brooklyn. See jeremymichaelclark.com