Here are some of Elani Wales’s most beloved poems by other authors.
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The link will take you to a recording of Mary Oliver giving a reading of Wild Geese. This must be one of Mary Oliver’s most incomparably beautiful and open poems. I know it’s always spoken softly and deeply to me.
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What a poem at such a time. I keep returning to it again and again. I sometimes think of it as a kind of counterpart to This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin – two poems about impossible everyday suffering that come to two very different conclusions.
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This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin
So dark. So bitter. So utterly memorable and iconic.
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Making jazz swing in seventeen syllables. I stumbled on this poem in high school, and I’ve had the ninth haiku memorized ever since. I love it.
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The Uses of Sorrow by Mary Oliver, published in Thirst, 2006
The Uses of Sorrow (in my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
Whenever I ask myself if I need to make a poem longer, I think of this. It only needs to be long enough to devastate you. I can’t think of anything more resonant than the box full of darkness.
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