My grandmother, Jean Gosse, wrote poems that reflected daily life and concerns in mid-20th century Newfoundland. At the time “The Little Boy who didn’t pass” was written (the early 1950s), Newfoundland had only recently become a province of Canada. Prior to Confederation in 1949, Newfoundlanders were British subjects; but, to hear my grandmother [...]

Thanatopsis
by William Cullen Bryant
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When [...]

HOW TO GET THERE
by Shessu Foster
HOW TO GET THERE: downhill from the jail where deputies in training formation, stragglers staggering up past the school where we played football on the lawn, down the avenue behind Plaza Market, “The Wall That Cracked Open”-Willie Herron painted faces of the afflicted breaking through the walls of oppression after [...]

The Day Lady Died
by Frank O’Hara
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street [...]

Don’t ask me for words
by Eugenio Montale
(Genoa, 1896 – Milan, 1981; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1975)
Don’t ask me for words that might define
our formless soul, publish it
in letters of fire, and set it shining,
lost crocus in a dusty field.
Ah, that man so confidently striding,
friend to others and himself, careless
that the dog day’s sun might [...]

Byzantium
by W. B. Yeats
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades’ [...]

In celebration of National Poetry Month, From the Square will feature NYU Press authors selecting and discussing their favorite poems. Come back every day for a new poem!
Participating authors: Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Michael Berube, Phil Zuckerman, Andrew Ross, Arnaldo Testi, and David Freeland.

“Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne)”
[1940]
by Federico García Lorca, Greg Simon and Steven F. White, trans., 1998
from Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
Lunar creatures sniff and circle the dwellings.
Live iguanas will come to bite the men who don’t dream,
and the brokenhearted fugitive will meet on [...]