Many know Thomas Hardy through his novels such as The Return of the Native and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. However, he also wrote huge amounts of poetry. He had about one thousand poems published in his lifetime. The biographer, Claire Tomalin, says that his poems show “the contradictions always present in Hardy, between the vulnerable, doomstruck man and the serene inhabitant of the natural world.” I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp…

I have featured one of William Stafford’s poems before here. He said of his life “I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse that comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.” This poem gives that feeling of a peaceful life. On a frozen pond a mile north of Liberal almost sixty years ago I skated wild circles while a strange pale sun went down. A scattering of dry brown reeds cluttered the ice at one…

Stephen Dunn is an American poet who went to college on a basketball scholarship, worked in advertising, left to live in Spain and write a novel, and eventually ended up as a poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his volume, Different Hours. His poetry is described as being “concerned with the anxieties, fears, joys, and problems of how to coexist in the world with all those who are part of our daily lives.” She pressed her lips to mind. --a typo How many years I must have yearned for someone's lips against mind. Pheromones, newly born, were floating between us. There was hardly any air. She kissed me again,…