April Flowers

National Poetry Month has made April the best time to look in bookstores for the new work of both novice and established poets.

In the former category, this year, comes "The Incentive of the Maggot" (Mariner Books, 80 pages, $12), Ron Slate's debut as a poet after a long career in business. With remarkable assurance and directness, Mr. Slate takes on our current political, economic, and millennial nightmares: "The twentieth century falls through the mind / in no hurry to reach a conclusion. / Plummets or spirals without expecting / to strike what it aims at. / But strikes it anyway." Among the new collections by well-known poets - including John Ashbery's "Where Shall I Wander" (Ecco, 96 pages, $22.95), Stephen Dobyns's "Mystery, So Long" (Penguin, 112 pages, $17), and "A Word Like Fire," the selected poems of the late Dick Barnes (Handsel, 141 pages, $17) - one stand-out is "My Noiseless Entourage" (Harcourt, 88 pages, $22), by Charles Simic. Mr. Simic is still the master of his inimitable, surreal landscape, where nightmares and epiphanies bleed into one another: "An old man carrying a chair / And a rope into the backyard / As if he meant to hang himself / And then sat down and lost track of time."

Harcourt is one of the indispensable poetry publishers, doing especially valuable work in bringing new British poetry to American readers. This month, they publish the American debuts of two of the UK's leading younger poets. In "Minsk" (96 pages, $21), Lavinia Greenlaw writes precisely and without inflation about memory, family, travel, and art, looking for small revelations in subjects as ordinary as "Silica": "This beach is a ledge of pulverised light, / the ashes of someone barely there / in the first place: a wraith." If Ms. Greenlaw's mild exactitude is one good example of what poetry sounds like today, the humorous, colloquial voice of Simon Armitage's "The Shout" (128 pages, $23) is another. Mr. Armitage's clever, surprising poems can recall both Paul Muldoon and James Tate, as in "Man With a Golf Ball Heart": "They set about him with a knife and fork, I heard, / and spooned it out. Dunlop, dimpled, perfectly hard."

The Library of America marks National Poetry Month by releasing the latest three volumes in its American Poets Project series. "Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems" (200 pages, $20), edited by Edward Hirsch, offers a good summary of the work of this gifted, influential, yet frustratingly limited poet. A member of the so-called "middle generation" in American poetry, a contemporary of Lowell and Bishop, Roethke began his career writing in the clipped Metaphysical idiom of the New Critics. His breakthrough came when he invented the strange language of his best work, a fluid, prelogical style perfectly suited to capturing the instinctive life of plants and animals: "What's this? A dish for fat lips. / Who says? A nameless stranger. / Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell." Such ominous babbling would later be used to terrific effect by Sylvia Plath, among others. But Roethke himself declined into a poetic second childhood in his late work, reverting to blatant imitations of Yeats and Eliot in poems like "A Walk in Late Summer." This volume suggests that Roethke will endure as the author of a few moving lyrics, like "My Papa's Waltz."

The other Library of America titles are also well worth reading. "Poets of the Civil War" (250 pages, $20), edited by J.D. McClatchy, collects fading anthology pieces like "Barbara Frietchie" as well as poems by Whitman and Dickinson, and raises once again the question of why America's greatest tragedy produced so little great tragic poetry. And "Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems" (200 pages, $20), edited by John Hollander, makes available a range of work by the poet forever identified with the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses." While her language is seldom better than Wordsworth-and-water, Lazarus remains interesting for her pioneering attempt to bring Jewish themes and subjects into American poetry.

Finally, there are several prose books coming out this spring that will appeal to readers of poetry. May sees the publication of "The Best Day, The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon" (Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $23), Donald Hall's memoir of his marriage to the beloved poet, who died of leukemia at age 47 in 1995. While he tells the story of their 23-year marriage, Mr. Hall focuses mainly on Kenyon's final illness, about which both poets wrote movingly in verse. Marriage, art, and illness are all treated with wisdom in Mr. Hall's account of "the house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief; the house of solitude and art; the house of Jane's depression and my cancers and Jane's leukemia." Finally, two major collections of poets' letters will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this coming June: "The Letters of Robert Lowell" (888 pages, $40) and "A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright" (672 pages, $30). Both of these large books will delight fans, as well as adding important new dimensions to our understanding of 20th-century American poetry.