Poet's Choice

"Glory be to God for dappled things," writes Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem "Pied Beauty," and "Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement," says William Butler Yeats's character in "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop." Cate Marvin begins her exhilarating, fierce new book with a poem in that tradition of embracing the foul with the fair. Like her predecessors, Marvin exults in a powerful music of tumbling consonants and linked sounds:

LOVE THE CONTAGION

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Quest the contagion, funnel much muck

through your hands upraised and cupped,

pour river-brack down your throat, pick

your scabs with loving glee. Love your

master of pestilence, conqueror of white

clothes: mud prints, paw prints, germs

not even the physician knows. Eat through

a muskrat's lair, divine the grub's slumber

beneath rotting leaves, take the lot, crush

it in your bare hands. Look at the moon

for its holes, narrow your eye at its skin