Who didnt have a mother who clipped poems? A mom who didnt hand-copy poetry from a book or magazine and tucked them away? When I cleaned out my parents home more than 10 years ago after my mothers death at 87 from cancer, I found plenty of poetry that she had discovered and kept. She underlined key words for stress. What she had chosen to save spoke volumes about her own personality, temperament and grace.
In her trappings were also plenty of those colorful Ideals magazines, published monthly with seasonal poetry, wonderful idealized artwork and essays that exuded powerful ideas of hope, beauty and love.
In the mail this week was a review copy of 100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits, a trove of famous and not so well-known poems gleaned by author Leslie Pockell of Westchester County, N. Y., assisted by Celia Johnson. Pockell asserts that all people get the blues. Nobody really understands why at times you just dont feel good about yourself or the world at large, he says. Some turn to liquor or drugs for relief.Powerful poetry, instead, brings relief, Pockell said, and the reader does not have to heed any warning to not operate heavy machinery after using it.
The poems are partly “Memory Lane” for any reader — poetry that was required reading in literature or that we commonly found in general reading. The writers were ones we studied in school because they helped shape ideas during in the unfolding human story in eras when poetry sometimes was the common means of written expression.
With an economy of words, of course, poets express themselves on many overt and subtle levels, calling on the reader to determine what is being said. 100 Poems are divided into four sections nature, nonsense, spiritual and The Human Connection, each read to fit the mood of the reader. That last section includes sweeping works: British essayist Ben Jonsons Inviting a Friend to Supper; Sam Walter Foss The House by the Side of the Road (which hung in a frame in our living room during all my growing up years); Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop; and Rudyard Kiplings If.
The Spiritual section has such wealth as William Cullen Bryants Thanatopsis; Desiderata by Max Ehrmann (I had that on a poster hanging in my Army barracks room in the early 1970s); The Donkey by G. K. Chesterton; The Song of Songs, the sensual book of the Hebrew Bible; and the lyrics of the recent hit Dont Worry, Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin.
It just gets better. Under Nonsense, theres Shel Silversteins classic Where the Sidewalk Ends, Eugene Fields Wynken, Blynken and Nod and Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.And I havent even mentioned the contributions by one-time Poet Laureate of the United States Rita Dove (who taught creative writing at Arizona State University, 1991-99 and won a Pulitzer Prize while there.). Nor of entries of Robert Frost, Robert Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Guest, John Updike, William Blake and Ogden Nash.
My mother would have devoured the book. 100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits by Leslie Pockell, with Celia Johnson is $12.99, Grand Central Publishing Trade Paperback http://www.HatchetteBookGroupUSA.comAnd take heed of what Sheldon Harnick penned in Merry Little Minute:
Theyre rioting in Africa.
Theres strife in Iran.
What nature doesnt do to us
Will be done by our fellow man.
