favourite poems

After a long hiatus, I'm back. At the rate I'm going I will only scratch the surface of my favourite things list in the remaining 250 or so days of my 50th year.

Here's a poem from Mary Oliver, the top poet on the favourite thing list (mentioned by at least four people). This is Bill A's favourite, "What is the Greatest Gift?":

What is the greatest gift?
Could it be the world itself—the oceans, the meadowlark,
the patience of the trees in the wind?
Could it be love, with its sweet clamor of passion?
Something else—something else entirely
holds me in thrall.
That you have a life that I wonder about
more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a life—courteous, intelligent—
that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
That you have a soul—your own, no one else’s—
that I wonder about more than I wonder about my own.
So that I find my soul clapping its hand for yours
more than my own.

I want to add my own favourite Mary Oliver poems but can't find my books. Later.

And a few days ago I bought Ann Carson's Nox. In fact, this book is what inspired me finally to return to my favourite things list. The book is stunningly beautiful visually and physically (it is a pleasure to hold and touch!) and the content is equally stunning and moving. It is, I think, the most beautiful (in every sense) new book I have ever seen and read.

Here's a passage from the book:"I have loved this poem [by Catullus] since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have tried to translate it a number of times. Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind."
Here's another line: "Something inbetween, something so deeply swaying."
And here's Carson's description of the book: "When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get."