REGALA UNA POESIA

Looking toward the holidays, we’re grateful for the poets and poems that have enlivened our year. They speak to all kinds of experiences and, potentially, all kinds of readers on your gift list. We have James Merrill’s letters crammed with life and art, Catherine Cohen’s outrageous and tender poems-about-town, and the equally tender but searing revelations of Tomás Q. Morín. In Sarah Arvio we find wit and titanic heartbreak; in Brooks Haxton, the moral compass of the natural world; Kevin Young brings us home to family, to gatherings of joy and grief. Jane Hirshfield takes contemporary account of our impact on the earth while Amit Majmudar translates the age-old wisdom of the Bhagavad-Gita; you can enter the future in Brenda Shaughnessy’s shocking exhibition of humans, curated by cephalopods, or into the deep musical pulse of Jonah Mixon-Webster’s work about Blackness and the self. And who would so many us be without the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, whose tremendous output we celebrate even as we mourn his loss? Finally, the groundbreaking biography of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark is now in paperback (though it still might not fit in a stocking), and, for a life in poems, we offer a poetic telling of Beethoven’s story, by Ruth Padel. The lines below, with our best wishes for the season, come from a poem inspired by words the composer wrote above the third movement of his String Quartet Opus 132, in 1825: “Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the deity, in the Lydian mode.”

from “In the Lydian Mode”                                                Ultraviolet ash, melody like flying jewels. Lightning connecting earth and sky. The hope of figuring what to hope for and to live inside that hope. A place to lay the feathers and dust of yesterday. Memories of your earliest wish: a world where every soul will have fair turns. A hermitage, a ghost of sunrise where the sky brushes a sea aglow with grace, and calm as the mist above it, wakening the newborn blue of heaven. Quiet as a wreath of sleep for anyone in sorrow. The slow unfold at last of a promise that everything will be laid to rest, every falling cadence in its place. A holy city, a halo of gold leaf, saying tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift from God. Without the dark we’d never see the stars.