The Gift of Form

I picked up this book by happenstance at the library's used book store and am thoroughly glad I did.

David Yezzi's poems in Birds of the Air provide a lovely example of the modern use of classic poetic forms such as the sonnet. One hardly notices the regularity of the rhymes embedded within contemporary subjects and what sounds like well-educated and perceptive, but not stilted, speech -- until the sound overcomes the sense and reveals the words' formal arrangement.

It's the best kind of poetry: thoughtful, sensitive, worthy of repeated return.

Excerpt:

Orts

Tough to say from this tableful of scraps
what couples feasted here -- gnawed olive stones
among the burnt ends of cold meat, the laps
of cantaloupes splayed open, spindly bones
of game birds, unloaved crusts, a waxy rind.
Did late-harvest wine unloose their wild talk?
Whose restless eyes, at once far-off and kind,
looked skyward on an after-dinner walk?
The clues are hard to tease out: were they fair
or compromised, temperate or gluttonous;
did some not give a fig and others care?
Both, perhaps, and in both just like us,
who, swept up in the whirl of tonight's laughter,
pay no special mind to what comes after.

Note: I counted this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.