When Carmela Ciuraru, former editor of the Journal of the Poetry Society of America, asked poets to recount their first experiences with verse, the response was astounding. Poets ardently selected the poems that made them fall in love with poetry, commemorating the sparks that led to a lifelong commitment to the architecture of language. The result, featuring many Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning poets, is a marvelous anthology of poignant, intimate, often humorous essays accompanied by the poems that inspired our most celebrated poets. Regardless of your relationship to verse — reader, student, writer, or someone entirely new to its myriad pleasures — First Loves is sure to enchant and delight.
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Maybe it was a Keats sonnet, or e.e. cummings's "somewhere i never traveled," or some craggy lines from Robert Frost. Perhaps it was Yeats or Eliot or Lorca. Somewhere, deep in our memory, is that ur-poem, the first lines that awakened us to the magic of words. Curious about such original visions, editor Carmela Ciuraru queried no fewer than 68 poets of every size and metrical shape about the verse that first turned on their light bulbs. Their responses will alternately surprise you and confirm your pleasure. The selections range from Mother Goose to Leonard Cohen; from Lewis Carroll to Anna Akhmatova; the contributing poets, from W. S. Merwin and Margaret Atwood and Mark Strand to writers refreshingly unfamiliar. This banquet of a book begs to be given.