Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum by Norman Dubie (poetry)

Help! Could someone please explain what the heck is going on in these poems? The back of the book calls them a "broken fantasia." Exactly. It's like fragments of a fever dream. I actually like some fragments of the fragments and I'm all for a poem called "A Lost Notebook of Srinivasa Ramanujan" because I happen to know who Ramanujan is. (All those years living with a mathematician counts for something.) But he lost me at threads of blood.

The Book of Medicines by Linda Hogan (poetry)

I found a listing in an old notebook of a whole bunch of poetry books by Native American poets. So, I ordered them from the library. The Wendy Rose one bored me even though I took a class from Wendy Rose and liked her. The anthology really bored me because it was a discussion of the poets not their actual poetry, but this one I like. This is the type of non-literal imagery I can handle:

Hunger crosses oceans.
It loses its milk teeth.
It sits on the ship and cries.

or

The bear is a dark continent
that walks upright
like a man.

Nature by May Swenson (poetry)

Oh my goodness, Swenson blows my mind. Here's one:

A Day is Laid By

A day is laid by
It came to pass
Wind is drained
from the willow

Dusk interlaces
the grass
Out of the husk
of twilight
emerges the moon

This the aftermath
of jaded sunset
of noon
and the sirens of bees

Day and wrath
are faded
Now above the bars
of lonely pastures
loom the sacred stars

I feel so much peace and prayer in her work. It's like reading Mary Oliver. I also know where I am and what's going on, always a plus.

New Poetry of Mexico

And by new we mean 1970. This is a bilingual book, and I don't speak any Spanish, so I accept that much is lost on me. Plus, I know nothing about the history of Mexico, the history of poetics in Spanish, these poets. . .it would be astonishing if I got anything out of this work given my lack of context. But I do. Partially because they reference Greek and Roman mythology, which I do know. Partially because most of them are translated by two poets I enjoy--W.S. Merwin and Phillip Levine. Partially because who knows why, they speak to me. I'm speaking particularly of "Wind from All Compass Points" by Octavio Paz and "The Drunken Girl" by Efrain Huerta.