Coming to Age

This year, I promised myself that I would read more poetry. This is my second book of poetry that I've read this year and is probably my favorite. I think I enjoyed this collection so much because it was from such a wide variety of poets and it really gave me a chance to be exposed to a bunch of different styles and themes. Although this book is focused on aging and getting older, I think that many people of all different ages will get a lot out of this collection. Anyone who has dealt with aging (old or young) will find poems in this collection that they can relate to. I really enjoyed the poems that encouraged the reader to experience and enjoy life no matter how far along in life you are.

A few of my favorites from the collection:

Season to Season by Clive James
Living in the Body by Joyce Sutphen
In the Borderlands by Ursula K. Le Guin
Forgetfulness by Billy Collins
Wean Yourself by Mathnawi, III 49-6
The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska (translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)
Advice by Langston Hughes

A good read, full of poems by known and new to me authors.
It made me think and I loved what I read.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

In her poem Reconsideration, Mary Ann Hoberman reminds us, "...only lucky folk grow old."

When I was a young woman older people would tell me, "Don't ever grow old, Nancy." I would laugh and reply, "It's better than the alternative."

Now I am an older person, I still think old age better than the alternative. Still, every year brings a new reminder of what I am loosing. For the first time I feel a chill at the idea of nothingness. How can I not be? How can the world be if I am not?

This mystery begins to niggle at me when I wake at night.

Coming to Age is a collection of poetry that speaks to the universal human experience of aging and the concerns and joys that accompany growing older. The poems were chosen for their universality and accessibility.

Themes include being rooted in this time and place; the passage of time; the solace of nature; the physical body's frailty; the loss of loved ones; the view from old age; the memories that made us who we are; the mystery of life; and that which gives solace and joy and sustains us.

Many of the poems moved me, eliciting a cold chill of recognition or a warm sun of memory.

"But memories, where can you take them to? Take one last look at them. They end with you," wrote Clive James in Star System. And I wonder about all the knowledge I hold that will be lost, the swing of my mother's blonde ponytail ascending the stairs when I was three, the sound of my son's baby voice. And I regret all the untold tales held secret in my mother's breast, the stories lost with death.

It takes a kind of courage to read these poems, to open yourself to grapple with life and death. But you will find catharsis and a recognition that you are not alone, and you will perhaps even find joy.

There is "So much to do still, all of it praise," Derek Walcott wrote in Untitled #51.,"...how pure a thing is joy."

"What love, what longing, my reader, speaks to you from this page!" proclaims John Hall Wheelock in To You, Perhaps Yet Unborn, in which he imagines readers who read his words posthumously.

These poems are the gifts of poets whose words reach out over years or centuries to alter our perceptions and comfort us.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

A lovely anthology of poems from all sorts of poets and places, brought together by the common theme of growth, aging and living and highlighted by some thoughtful forewords and commentary threaded through the book.