How Lovely the Ruins

I ordered this book at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, and I read on it all through the year. I'd hoped to find comfort in these poems and quotes “for difficult times,” and I did, at times, but it was a mixed bag. The ruins focus primarily on political ruins arising out of our American election of 2016, and those ruins definitely continued through 2020, but there's no mention, of course, of the greater ruins spawned by the pandemic that began and then flourished during the year, though the poems, like all good poems, touches on those, too.

All of which is to say I liked very much, but did not love, this book of poems about disasters and troubles and difficulties, and I don't really know why. Lots of familiar poems here: “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers; Maya Angelou's Still I Rise; Fire and Ice; Langston Hughes' I, Too. New-to-me poems, also, including W. H. Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts; What Kind of Times Are These by Adrienne Rich; and Jamaal May's There Are Birds Here from which the book's title is taken.