Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000

All through the book readers are invited to the quiet and intensity of reading, not exactly as if it were the blessed water in a medieval baptismal font in an old church, the entire violence of the world carved onto the outside of the font-that is the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer's figure for the wish of poetry-but something more like a haiku of the eighteenth-century master Buson. It is a poem about a particular kind of Book of Hours, a cheaply printed, cheaply bound farmer's almanac. The poem goes like this: This old almanac, Gladdens my heart, Like a sutra.

It would be pleasant if a book of this kind shared the qualities of almanac and sutra, in the way that poetry can seem both to penetrate time and penetrate our days, more deeply than our walking-around consciousness usually does, and to lift us out of it, the turning wheel, so that we can see ourselves and the life around us more clearly.