Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, February 24, 2008

For this, my farewell "Poet's Choice" column, here are two poems related by a form: the sonnet. This little 14-line variable recipe seems to have an endless capacity for different purposes, settings and feelings. "Night Harvest," by Lam Thi My Da, is translated from the Vietnamese by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh:

White circles of conical hats have come out

Like the quiet skies of our childhood

Like the wings of storks spread in the night

White circles evoking the open sky

The golds of rice and cluster-bombs blend together

Even delayed-fuse bombs bring no fear

Our spirits have known many years of war

Come, sisters, let us gather the harvest

Each of us wears her own small moon

Glittering on a carpet of gold rice

We are the harvesters of my village

Twelve white hats bright in the long night

We are not frightened by bullets and bombs in the air

Only by dew wetting our lime-scented hair.

This poem in a Western form, written when Western bombs were falling on Vietnam, appears in a new anthology edited by Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Sonnet. Boland's own book Against Love Poetry contains a poem that illustrates what I mean by saying the recipe varies: in the case, 14 lines without end rhyme, incorporating the title as the first words of a sentence:

Is It Still the Same

young woman who climbs the stairs,

who closes a child's door,

who goes to her table

in a room at the back of a house?

The same unlighted corridor?

The same night air

over the wheelbarrows and rain-tanks?

The same inky sky and pin-bright stars?

You can see nothing of her, but her head

bent over the page, her hand moving,

moving again, and her hair.

I wrote like that once.

But this is different:

This time, when she looks up, I will be there.

Different though they are, these poems share a deep assurance that something in culture, in art, in the art of poetry and its forms, endures to speak across distances: from one culture to another, from place to place, and across time from generation to generation. In each, the writing of the poem itself become part of that story of endurance.

(Lam Thi My Da's poem "Night Harvest" can be found in the anthology "The Making of a Sonnet." Edited by Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland. Norton. Copyright 2008 by Norton. Eavan Boland's poem can be found in her book "Against Love Poetry." Norton. Copyright 2001 by Eavan Boland.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: For a little more than three years now, we've handed this space over to Robert Pinsky, a poet who is often called "poetry's rock star" for his passionate conviction that this highest of literary arts should be loved by the most ordinary of people. As a U.S. Poet Laureate, as a professor at Boston University, and as author or editor of 19 books, Pinsky has tirelessly promoted the craft and the work of his fellow poets. And here, in Book World, in more than 150 columns, he has combined his prodigious knowledge with a sharp eye for emerging talent. We thank him for a splendid run.