For over a week, whenever I open Richard Wilbur I have been unable or unwilling to turn the page past his poem “The Event.” This is a pleasant and frequent dilemma. 🙂

Delighted with myself and with the birds,
I set them down and give them leave to be.
It is by words and the defeat of words,
Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,
That for a flying moment one may see
By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt.

@tinyroofnail Can you recommend a Wilbur collection? I'm looking at New & Collected Poems. Is there a "Best of"?

@JohnBrady Not sure about a best of, but I’ve been reading his Collected Poems 1943-2004, which has most of them. If you add what I think is his last collection Anterooms, I think that’s a pretty comprehensive set. As someone struggles with a lot of poetry just as much as loves it, I’d say he’s worth the whole set

@tinyroofnail Incidentally— I keep seeing more essays on enchantment and attention, and I keep being bored with them. But pulling my (earlier, less collected) Wilbur collection off the shelf to hunt for this poem I found "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," which may be my favorite Wilbur poem and renders all those essays unnecessary. (For obvious reasons I can't provide a link, but it's in Things of This World (1956) if your collection, like mine, is chronological.)

@dwalbert One of my most treasured pieces of “bookshelf art” is a 1977 collection called Night Train at Wiscassett Station. We found it at an antique shop last year and it instantly became my favorite “Maine” book. I have meant to write about it many times.

The photographer, Kosti Ruohomaa, has a photo that reminds me of that poem, and vice versa. I’ll post a picture of it shortly