Fiona’s Reviews > A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025 > Status Update

NEW YEAR’S EVE

–Carl Denis–

However busy you are, you should still reserve
One evening a year for thinking about your double,
The man who took the curve on Conway Road
Too fast, given the icy patches that night,
But no faster than you did; the man whose car
When it slid through the shoulder
Happened to strike a girl walking alone
From a neighbor’s party to her parent’s farm,
While you car struck nothing

SWALLOWS
–A.E. STALLINGS–

Every year the swallows come
And put their homestead in repair,
And raise another brood, and skim
And boomerang through summer air,
And reap mosquitoes from the hum
Of holidays. A handsome pair
One on the nest, one on the wire,
Cheat-cheat-cheat, the two conspire

To murder half the insect race,
And feed them squirming to their chicks.
They work and fret at such a pace,
And natter in

TO MY FIFTIES
Kenneth Koc

I should say something to you
Now that you have departed over the mountains
Leaving me to my sixties and seventies, not hopeful of your return,
O you, who seemed to mark the end of life, who ever would have
thought that you would burn
With such sexual fires as you did? I wound up in you
Some work I had started long before. You were
A time for completion and for destruction.

MRS. DUMPTY
—Chana Bloch—

The last time the doctors gave up,
I put the pieces together
and bought him a blue wool jacket, a shirt,
and a tie with scribbles of magenta,
brown buckle shoes. I dressed him
and sat him down
with a hankie in his pocket, folded into points.
Then a shell knit slowly
over his sad starched heart.

He’d laugh and dangle his long legs and call out,
What a fall that was!

PANTOUM OF THE DEPRESSION YEARS
–Donald Justice–

Our lives avoided tragedy
Simply by going on and on.
Without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on
We managed. No need for the heroic
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don’t remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.

THE ELM SPEAKS
—Sylvia Plath–

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root.
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it; I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it!
Listen. These are its hooves. It has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,

WAIT
—Galway Kinnell—

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Secondhand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands.

LIGHTING A CANDLE FOR W. H. AUDEN
(In the Church of Maria am Gestade, Vienna)

—James Wright—

The poet kept his promise
To the earth before he died.
He sleeps now in Kirchstetten
Some twenty miles from here.
I did not go to mourn him,
Although I could have gone
And found him among the beeches.
Best to leave him alone.

Maria am Gestade,
Mary on the shore,

DRANK A LOT
—Leonard Cohen—

i drank a lot. i lost my job.
i lived like nothing mattered.
then you stopped, and came across
my little bridge of fallen answers.

i don’t recall what happened next.
i kept you at a distance.
but tangled in the knot of sex
my punishment was lifted.

and lifted on a single breath—
no coming and no going—
o G-d, you are the only friend
i never thought of knowing.

ZUCCHINI
—Peter Balakian—

My grandmother cored them
with a serrated knife

with her hands that had come
through the slaughter—

So many hours I stared at the blotch
marks on her knuckles,

her strong fingers around the
long green gourd—

In a glass bowl the stuffing was setting—
chopped lamb, tomato pulp, raw rice, lemon juice,

a sand brew of spices—
from the riverbank of her birth—