Cast Away: Poems for Our Time
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Middle School, High School    Greenwillow    159 pp.
2/20    978-0-06-290769-1    $16.99
e-book ed.  978-0-06-290771-4    $10.99

Current Young People’s Poet ­Laureate Nye finds inspiration in those things we throw away — as well as in the act of throwing things away and that of picking them up again. It’s a surprisingly flexible metaphor for this collection of over eighty free-verse, free-range poems, from the lyrical to the humorous, ecological to political, brief to meandering. In “Not a Bagel, But…” Nye commemorates poet David Ignatow, thanking him for “an image from a poem which can / stay with you your whole life,” and in her relaxed, conversational style, she drops many such images so casually arrived at that they are all the more convincing. “Trees are ferocious. / They might be planning things. / How can we ever again sit calmly in the shade?” The collection is divided into five sections (whose distinctions elude this reviewer), but they don’t interfere with the eminent browsability of the volume. Pick up a poem, why don’t you?

From the March/April 2020 Horn Book Magazine.