This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it
– from Lisel Mueller’s “Alive Together”
April is National Poetry Month, so I wanted to squeeze in this review this week. However, I didn’t squeeze in this book. 
No, I read it over months (years?), coming back and forth to certain poems, picking them up and putting them down to see how they look on different days, in different light. What I found (beyond the nourishment and the third-eye seeing, of course) is that often I dread reading poetry. Not because I don’t like it, but because it can make me feel so much! Reading a good poem is like grabbing a cosmic live wire with both hands, sending jolts of transcendence through the body, an act that changes things, but passes. Unless we do it again.
Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul contains, erm, twenty poems. The poems are selected, introduced, and occasionally written by Judith Valente (a journalist) and Charles Reynard (a judge). The couple/poets divide up the book into ten sections, with broad subjects like Mystery, Bodies, Work, Prayer, Loss, that kind of thing. They take turns presenting the text of poems and then afterwards offering essays and commentary on the poems. Almost like little devotionals, or meditations. It’s a non-threatening way to try out reading poetry, if poetry isn’t really your thing.
Valente and Reynard are both Christian (Catholic, I think?). They discuss their faith, but this is not a Christian book. The poets included in this collection range in worldview. However, it is a book about spirit and transcendence and connecting to the cosmos and one another. In that way the poets and poems have a lot in common. They’re working to find something gorgeous in the mundane of the every day. I think that’s what poetry is, or at least what the poetry that I like is.
That’s why I have to be careful with poems. They’re powerful.
