Barnes & Noble100 Poems That Matter by The Academy of American Poets

Inspiring Poems

Tyrants fear the poet. from In This Place by Amanda Gorman Poetry that matters. Of course I had to read it. Inside I found well-loved verses and new poems that left their imprint. What matters? Being alive here in this world. Justice. Love. Nature. Embracing all of life, its joys and its sorrows, our youth and our age. Freedom. Dignity. It's all in these poems. How should we live? The first poem, On Living by Nazim Hikmet, encourages us to "live with great seriousness," planting a tree at seventy, embracing life, proclaiming that "we must live as if we will never die." In Failing and Flying, Jack Gilbert offers that "anything worth doing is worth doing badly," suggesting that "Icarus was not failing as he fell, just coming to the end of his triumph." Life has its grief. Yet, Philip Larkin reminds in An Arundel Tomb, "What will survive of us is love." We call out for justice. "You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise," May Angelou proclaims. In I Can't Breathe, Pamela Sneed decries the deaths of black men. We are called to protect the Earth which offers "The Peace of Wild Things", as Wendell Berry reminds us. Celebrate your body and its desire. You will find poems by Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Bishop, E. E. Cummings and Emily Dickinson, Louse Gluck and Amanda Gorman, Seamus Heaney and Langton Hughes, Amy Lowell and Federico Garcia Lorca, Marianne Moore an Sharon Olds, Mary Olive and Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke and Rumi, Sappho and Alfred Lord Tennyson, Phillis Wheatley and Walk Whitman. Its an inspiring volume. I received an ARC from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.