Nice anthology. ( )

The Good Knight is on his watch when he hears a sound. Roar! Is it a dragon? A great big dragon? He searches the woods and finds a surprise.

An anthology of 185 poems selected by Garrison Keillor, chosen as poems he might send to a friend whose life had taken a bad turn. Not poems of suffering, but poems that are bracing. An eclectic assortment, from Shakespeare to Whitman to Burma Shave verses.

This is a good collection of poetry, with a worthwhile introduction in Keillor's typical sensitive, pragmatic, and humorous midwestern fatherly way.

Years ago, while studying critical theory in grad school, I read Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter?. Keillor answers this question 20 years later: "...what really matters about poetry and what distinguishes poets from, say, fashion models or ad salesmen is the miracle of incantation in rendering the gravity and grace and beauty of the ordinary world and thereby lending courage to strangers" (Kindle location 189). Speaking about his childhood, Keillor says about his father, "when he took a chicken by the legs and laid its neck against the block and lifted the ax and chopped off its head, there was a plain cadence to that. I hear that whack in poetry...poetry is about driving the nail into the pine, killing the chicken, mowing grass, putting luggage into the car, gratitude for food, the laughter of a little girl, about our common life" (Kindle 225-241). Keillor offers numerous other thoughts and aphorisms about poetry that make the introductory essay alone worthwhile for anyone with the same questions about poetry's utility that I had years ago.

As inspiring and necessary and salt-of-the-earth as Keillor claims poetry to be, the fact that it is consumed more in anthologies than chapbooks testifies to its difficulty, its arrogance, its richness. Good poetry, like good chocolate, is best consumed in small doses, and Good Poems for Hard Times serves it up well. ( )

Keillor's first anthology of contemporary poetry, and the present one, are my two favourite modern anthologies of poetry. I think he's agree with Billy Collins that : "I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness'. The publication of this book makes the world a better place. ( )