Inspired by friends who have posting books that have influenced them, I generated a list of poems that have helped me and stayed with me so long that they feel like they are a part of me.
The first poem I remember knowing was The Swing, by Robert Louis Stevenson, which my mother recited to me often. I knew it by heart long before I could read. “Up in the air and over the wall/Til I can see so wide,/Rivers and trees and cattle and all/over the countryside.” I loved that it captured both the motion and the perspective change.
I fell in love with ee cummings in junior high due to the enthusiasm of a creative writing teacher. I have carried many cummings poems over the years, but [ i thank You], read at John’s and my wedding is the one that comes to mind most often. “(I who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday,…)
I was a T.S. Eliot fan in high school. The poem I remember reading and rereading was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
I learned of Elizabeth Bishop in a college poetry class, and One Art was a sort of theme song for awhile. “…the art of losing’s not hard to master/though it may look like (Writeit!) like disaster.”
In college someone (thankfully) introduced me to Margaret Atwood. I found Spelling in one of my anthologies. The line that spoke to me then was “A child is not a poem,/a poem is not a child.” Later—having both children and poems in my life—it is this one: “A word after a word/after a word is power.”
My sons and I memorized Robert Frost’s Mending Wall sitting in the rocking chair together when they were very young. They liked the lines about elves and the old-stone savage. I like the opening, a kind of lyrical thesis that said (to me) the opposite of what most people thought the poem was about. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall./ That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,/ and spills the upper boulders in the sun.”
I often receive sound advice from William Stafford’s poetry including The River, Freedom and especially A Ritual to Read to One Another, “For it is important that awake people be awake,/ or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.”
I read Wendell Berry’s, In the Country of Marriage at my parents’ 40thwedding anniversary celebration. They are now in their 55thyear of marriage, and this poem is still with me. “Like the water/of a deep stream, love is always too much.”
I believe I first heard Naomi Shahib Nye’s poem, Kindness, on Kristen Tipett’s show, On Being and I am so grateful for it. “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,/you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”
Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise comes to mind often. I also carry with me, Let Evening Come, “Let it come, as it will, and don’t/be afraid.”
A friend gave me Marie Howe’s book What the Living do, just when I needed it. The poem that comes forward most often is My Dead Friends, “I have begun,/when I am weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question/to ask my dead friends for their opinion/and the answer is often immediate and clear.”
And finally, many Mary Oliver poems are with me, always. Dogfish, and of course, Wild Geese and The Journey and The Rabbit. I think the first Oliver poem I held close was In Blackwater Woods, “To live in this world/you must be able/to do three things:/to love what is mortal;/to hold it/against your bones knowing/your own life depends on it;/and, when the time comes to let it go,/to let it go.
Laura Stavoe