Poetry Collections

A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, $26.95), by Mary Jo Salter. The newest work by Mary Jo Salter, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University after years of teaching at Mount Holyoke, incorporates fresh work, focusing on daily life both in the home and the world outside the front door, and some of her most popular earlier works, from the poem "Welcome to Hiroshima" to a handful of tender elegies.

Red Bird (Beacon, $23), by Mary Oliver. The esteemed poet's most hefty collection to date won't disappoint fans of her introspective touch and adroit observations of nature (often wincing at the exploitation of the planet and its peoples), but will also delight with an astonishing cycle of love poems.

Sea Change (Ecco, $23.95), by Jorie Graham. Winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Graham is back with a collection that speaks to the environmental degradation humanity has wrought.

Sixty Poems (Harcourt, $12) by Charles Simic. This near pocket-sized paperback gathers together some of the Yugoslav-born poet's most cherished verse, all in honor of his 2007 appointment as the 15th U.S. poet laureate.

Sleeping it Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected (FSG, $26), by August Kleinzahler. The Jersey City-born poet, considered a master of the free verse, lades his first ever "new and selected" medley with older travelogue-style poems penned from the many homes he's made around the globe, and continues that theme in new work that also touches on a curiosity for various voices and diction.

Special Orders (Knopf, $25), by Edward Hirsch. The award-winning writer offers a remarkably personal scrutiny of his life thus far in a series of taut verses.

Unmentionables (Norton, $23.95), by Beth Ann Fennelly. The collection's title is also its theme, as Fennelly winds through a series of short narratives and diverse poetic forms to explore those things in life that words cannot adequately express. Fennelly, a mother and professor of English, nabbed the Kenyon Review Prize on her first outing in 2001.

Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, $25), by Frank Bidart. Mortality is the leitmotif of this slim book of lyrical poems, which helped garner the Wellesley professor the 2007 Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

Wayfare (Penguin, $18), by Pattiann Rogers. The Lannan Literary Award-winner's 13th collection parses the variety of human creativity in six themed sections.

A Yes-or-No Answer (Houghton Mifflin, $22), by Jane Shore. As with her earlier collections, this batch of poems takes on the role of memoir as Shore contemplates the myriad ways her past reveals itself in the present.

POETRY IN TRANSLATION

Eternal Enemies (FSG, $24), by Adam Zagajewski. Born in Poland in 1945, Zagajewski has been compared to Milosz and Neruda for a body of work that scrutinizes the world from both a personal and historic perspective. Clare Cavanagh's translation reveals verse on language, history, place and elegies for dear friends and beloved writers.

In Praíse of the Unfinished: Selected Poems (Knopf, $25), by Julia Hartwig. Czeslaw Milosz himself anointed Hartwig "the grande dame of Polish poetry," and those unfamiliar with her work (or enthusiastic fans) can savor this first collection in English, spanning work from 1956 to 2004. Appreciation should go to John and Bogdana Carpenter, who translated the poems by Hartwig (who, ironically, is a well-respected translator of English and French poetry into Polish).