Celebrating National Poetry Month
Over the years some five hundred poems have appeared in the pages of the Review. A great range of poets, preoccupied with themes both personal and political, often translated from different languages—W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, John Berryman, Yehuda Amichai, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Czeslaw Milosz, to name a handful—have contributed to the Review. This collection forms part of our online archive and is available to Web subscribers, who have often told us how much it has meant to them to become reacquainted with the voices of poets they admire.
This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month—established in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets—the Review's editors have chosen thirty poems from the archives and will post one daily. You can bookmark this page and visit us each day in April for a new poem. You can also follow nybooks on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook for links to the daily poem. For more poetry and reviews from the Review's archives, you may be interested in the electronic edition, which provides full access to five decades of writing in the Review.
April 30
Moment
By Wislawa Szymborska
I walk on the slope of a hill gone green.
Grass, little flowers in the grass,
as in a children's illustration.
The misty sky's already turning blue.
A view of other hills unfolds in silence.
As if there'd never been any Cambrians, Silurians,
rocks snarling at crags,
upturned abysses,
no nights in flames
and days in clouds of darkness.
As if plains hadn't pushed their way here
in malignant fevers,
icy shivers.
As if seas had seethed only elsewhere,
shredding the shores of the horizons.
It's nine-thirty local time.
Everything's in its place and in polite agreement.
In the valley a little brook cast as a little brook.
A path in the role of a path from always to ever.
Woods disguised as woods alive without end,
and above them birds in flight play birds in flight.
This moment reigns as far as the eye can reach.
One of those earthly moments
invited to linger.
Previous poems
- April 29: Karl Kirchwey, "K. 453" (April 27, 2000)
- April 28: Czeslaw Milosz, "Account" (April 28, 1983)
- April 27: Paul Muldoon, "Affairs of State" (February 8, 2001)
- April 26: Richard Wilbur, "Playboy" (August 22, 1968)
- April 25: Robert Lowell, "9. Bishop Berkeley, from the sequence 'Power'" (April 24, 1969)
- April 24: John Ashbery, "Mixed Feelings" (April 3, 1975)
- April 23: Samuel Menashe, "Peaceful Purposes" (November 20, 1969)
- April 22: Brad Leithauser, "An Actor Plays a Trumpet" (February 28, 1985)
- April 21: Philip Larkin, "Home Is So Sad" (June 11, 1964)
- April 20: Sylvia Plath, "The Munich Mannequins" (February 20, 1964)
- April 19: Adam Zagajewski, "Subject: Brodsky" (March 1, 2007)
- April 18: Jack Gilbert, "Prospero Without His Magic" (March 3, 1994)
- April 17: W.H. Auden, "Et in Arcadia Ego" (June 3, 1965)
- April 16: James Merrill, "Home Fires" (March 29, 1990)
- April 15: John Berryman, "A Strut for Roethke" (October 17, 1990)
- April 14: Melissa Green, "Daphne in Mourning" (July 19, 2001)
- April 13: Jonathan Aaron, "The Voice from Paxos" (August 16, 1990)
- April 12: Edwin Frank, "Snake Train" (February 28, 1985)
- April 11: Elizabeth Bishop, "Twelfth Morning; Or What You Will" (April 2, 1964)
- April 10: Jorge Luis Borges, "A History of Night" (January 25, 1979)
- April 9: Zbigniew Herbert, "Three Poems by Heart" (October 22, 1998)
- April 8: Anthony Hecht, "Naming the Animals" (August 17, 1989)
- April 7: Anna Akhmatova, "Fragment, 1959" (March 9, 1978)
- April 6: Kenneth Koch, "To Psychoanalysis" (April 13, 2000)
- April 5: Charles Simic, "Sunday Papers" (June 10, 1999)
- April 4: Robin Robertson, "My Girls" (October 11, 2007)
- April 3: Joseph Brodsky, "Near Alexandria" (December 22, 1983)
- April 2: Christopher Logue, "From 'All Day Permanent Red...'" (May 15, 2003)
- April 1: W.S. Merwin, "One of the Lives" (April 22, 1993)