Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems

The New York Times Book Review wrote that William Meredith's poetry "suggests that we can recognize the hardest truths about ourselves and still live in the world." This collection, a summing up of Meredith's best writing over several decades, won the National Book Award, and is the sort of book readers will return to again and again for its considerable virtues: attention to craft, the ring of truth, and clarity in a world of muddle. Here's one favorite poem, titled "A Major Work": "Poems are hard to read / Pictures are hard to see / Music is hard to hear / And people are hard to love / But whether from brute need / Or divine energy / At last mind eye and ear / and the great sloth heart will move."