The Language of Spring Poems for the Season of Renewal

The entire world is reborn in spring. Starting in March, when the snow still drips from the branches of trees, and exploding into June, when a palpable vitality ignites the air, spring reminds us perhaps more than any other season that life is cyclical. In spring "trees leap up alive," "buds relax and spread," and the world, according to e. e. cummings, is "puddle-wonderful." Flowers, cherry blossoms, city sparrows -- and, of course, new love -- all play a role in this enticing season of renewal. The Language of Spring brings together forty poems that celebrate the season in all its guises: ecstatic, contemplative, deceptive, seductive, poignant. Delicately illustrated throughout by famed mid-twentieth-century woodcutter Fritz Kredel, this volume ranges from the classic tributes of William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to such contemporary visions as Jane Kenyon's "Spring Changes" and Yusef Komunyakaa's "April's Anarchy." In poems of uncompromising beauty, wit, and imagination, all the contributor's behold this enigmatic season through the lens of rebirth and renewal. Philip Larkin shrewdly notices the trick that budding trees play on us by looking new every year even though in their unseen rings they age as we do; Sara Teasdale reflects on how war destroys and nature continues despite the stubbornness of humankind; Richard Wright basks in a steady spring breeze; and Henry Reed famously reassembles a military rifle that may just turn out to be a spring garden. Book jacket.

Robert Atwan is founding editor of the Best American Essays series. His previous poetry anthologies include Chapters into Verse, Divine Inspiration, A Mind of Winter: Poems for a Snowy Season, The Language of Spring: Poems for the Season of Renewal, and The Heart of Autumn: Poems for the Season of Reflection.