Poet's Choice

Discussion Policy

Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.

By Robert Pinsky

Sunday, March 11, 2007

"A blizzard of bloodstained paper" amid "raging fires."

This image comes not from some poet's overwrought fantasy but from a news story about the recent suicide-bombing at "a popular book market" in Baghdad.

Blood and fire, in phrases quieter than these, appear in the sixth poem of "Meditations in Time of Civil War," by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). The poem contrasts its blood and fire with the idea of domestic shelter, embodied by a bird's nest (the stare, related to "starling"), by a bee's hive, by "a house burned" -- and by the poet's own study window:

THE STARE'S NEST BY MY WINDOW

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned,

CONTINUED 1 >

Find More Reviews and Features in Books

A pandemic waiting in the wings

Alan Sipress's superb and sobering "The Fatal Strain" details the shadowy progression of a virulent avian flu now moving across Asia.

Who do men say that I am?

Though too cursory to work as an intro to the Gospels, Mary Gordon's "Reading Jesus" should appeal to anyone who wants to wrestle with the problems and paradoxes of the New Testament.