Poetry

The winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Life on Mars (Graywolf, $15), by Tracy K. Smith, is poetry with a David Bowie soundtrack, While sampling some of Bowie’s lyrics, Smith’s third collection is a deftly crafted, thoughtful consideration of existence on Earth and beyond. In lines at once musical and muscular, Smith has composed an extended elegy for her father, who worked on the Hubble telescope. As matters of science, grief, and faith inform each other, Smith wonders ”is God being or pure force? The wind / or what commands it?”; in other poems she uses vivid cosmic imagery to speculate on whether loss of a life here is balanced by the existence of life out there. - Laurie Greer

ROSE by Li-Young Lee (Boa Editions, $15.50) Rose is Li-Young Lee’s first book, published in 1986. Since then, we’ve come to expect startling juxtapositions, elegant word play, sensitive observations, and philosophical musings from his poetry, but when we first encountered him, and his vision was new to us, here was something unmistakably fresh and original. Rose captures the essence of his poetic vision as well as any of his later works (also great). Read “From Blossoms” on page 21 as a good example. It begins in the everyday moment of a paper bag of peaches at a roadside stand and progresses to the transcendent eternal of “sweet impossible blossom.” At once intensely personal and universal, Lee’s poems explore and ask questions, expanding our experience and capturing the beauty in a single moment. - Mark LaFramboise