The Good Stuff

Sometime back I heard a David Budbill poem read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac, a regular short program on public radio stations. That poem led me to go buy a collection of Budbill's that I enjoyed a great deal. So I was delighted when I later ran across Good Poems, a collection of poetry from the show that has been selected and arranged by Keillor. I have been chewing through this assembly over the last year or so whenever the poetry mood strikes me, and have only just now finished finding my way to the end of it. This really is a great collection to have on your mantel for the times you need to indulge. I have dog-eared as much as a fourth of the poems for re-reading, so it has already become a treat to taste from this paperback whenever I am really needing take in just good stuff that I have already vetted.

Here is dog-eared poem chosen at random:

Weather

Because of the menace
your father opened
like a black umbrella
and held high
over your childhood
blocking the light,
your life now seems

to you exceptional
in its simplicities.
You speak of this,
throwing the window open
on a plain spring day,
dazzling
after such a winter.

-Linda Pastan