Whether because of the political events currently unfolding in America, the debut of the much-discussed Hulu adaptation in April, or a combination of the two, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, first published in 1985, has recently climbed back to the top of bestseller lists. Set in a dystopian future in which a totalitarian theocracy has taken over the United States, the novel, and the show it inspired, focus on the women subjugated under the new regime. The plot centers on these women’s bodies: their fertility, their mutilation, their subjection to physical discipline and sexual violation.

In a 2014 discussion of the language in the book, novelist Edan Lepucki observed a broader trend in Atwood’s writing:

Human beings like to forget their own bodies, and it takes being ill or turned on, or being threatened by the Supreme Court, to remember them. In fiction, there aren’t enough bodies: breathing, eating, having sex, breaking down. Unlike a lot of other writers, Margaret Atwood reasserts the corporeal in all of her work. In an email today, a poet friend of mine wrote, “Then we walked to the public library, where we both took incredibly satisfying dumps.” Let’s not forget what makes us human, everyone. Atwood never does.

In our December 1994 issue, for instance, Atwood described being “Bored” not so much as a mental state as a series of mundane physical tasks, sensations, and observations:

                                                                         It
wasn’t even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae.

You can read the full poem here and find more pieces by Atwood in our archives.

Amy Lowell’s legacy, as represented in the pages of The Atlantic and in the broader poetic landscape, is a spare and neglected one. Though she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, she never quite reached the heights of literary acclaim or recognition that her relatives James Russell Lowell and Robert Lowell did. And her poetry hasn’t attracted the same level of praise or popular readership as that of some of her contemporaries, like Ezra Pound, who both influenced and criticized her work, or Robert Frost, who she supported and encouraged in the early years of his career.

But in “Castles in Spain,” published in our August 1918 issue—just months before the end of World War I—she spoke powerfully to the resilience of her own work in the face of war, violence, and the passage of time:

Bombs and bullets cannot menace me,
Who have no substance to be overthrown.
Cathedrals crash to rubbish, but my towers,
Carved in the whirling and enduring brain,
Fade, and persist, and rise again, like flowers.

Many of Lowell’s towers endure, beautiful and evocative, in our archives, a testament to that resilience. You can find some of them—including her very first published work—here.

This time of year always reminds me of days spent hiking in the California mountains with my family when I was younger—something about the sunlight and the sudden, abundant greenness of everything, about the way the natural world feels more present and alive even in the middle of the city.

Though it was written about a place thousands of miles distant from the ones I explored as a child, Maxine Kumin’s “The Word” reminds me of those days, too. In the poem, Kumin captures a familiar quiet wonder and the feeling of being close to, but not quite a part of, nature as she describes interacting with wildlife around her New Hampshire home. Here are the first few lines:

We ride up softly to the hidden
oval in the woods, a plateau rimmed
with wavy stands of gray birch and white pine,
my horse thinking his thoughts, happy
in the October dapple, and I thinking
mine-and-his, which is my prerogative,

both of us just in time to see a big doe
loft up over the four-foot fence

Read the full poem here, and find more of Kumin’s work for The Atlantic here.

Shortly after New England poet Philip Booth passed away a decade ago, our poetry editor David Barber remembered his work:

Booth published ten collections of laconic, scrupulously crafted lyric verse notable for its spare colloquial language and contemplative presence of mind. Much of his work drew on his intimate local knowledge of the Down East Maine coast in and around his ancestral summer home in Castine, which he portrayed with an exacting nautical eye and a down-to-earth affinity for its flinty vernacular culture.

Booth’s love poem “Sixty,” from our March 1988 issue, is neither nautical nor particularly “flinty.” But it is characteristically spare, contemplative, and brief.

Here’s the poem in its entirety:

Spring hills, dark contraries:
a glade in a fall valley,
its one flower steeped with sun.

The there and here of her.
The soft where.
The sweet closeness when.

From dreams awake to turn her.
Remembering, remembering.
And now again. Again.

For more of Booth’s verse, read “Ox Pull: Canaan Fair,” from our August 1954 issue.

Today marks the end of National Poetry Month, so I’ll leave you with some verse from one of my favorite poets. From our February 1994 issue, here’s a bit of Mary Oliver’s “Mockingbirds”:

This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing

better to do
than listen.

This poem is beautiful in a quiet way: the short lines, the plain language, the simple, lovely images. Oliver excels at writing these idyllic natural scenes, conjuring forests or rivers, summer days or snowy nights, with just a few compact stanzas.

My favorite Oliver poems are the ones that don’t just describe those landscapes, but also draw sincere wisdom from them. At her best, Oliver is full of concise but profound insights: about survival, about goodness, about mortality and purpose—and, in “Mockingbirds,” about the essential act of listening.

In a broader sense, that’s what I love about all good poetry: its ability to get at the heartbeat of the world, at the beauty and emotion and significance that thrums at the very core of things, and put it into words.

Our archives are full of poems like that. Luckily for me, this month I had nothing better to do than listen.

From our December 1997 issue, here are the opening lines of David Solway’s “The Dream”:

I dreamed that you had ceased to love me —
not that you had come from other beds
back to mine, or gone from mine to others,
just that something in your heart had stopped.

“The Dream” has stuck with me since I first stumbled across it in our archives. I love the dream-like quality of the poem itself—its haziness and abstraction, the way the beloved woman appears only as a heart, a pair of eyes, and an empty space in the speaker’s bed. And I love the poignant futility of the fear it expresses, of losing a love that’s already lost.

Read the full poem here, and then take a look at some of Solway’s other work in our archives.

In his spare and lovely poem “The Bone Ring,” from our October 2010 issue, Donald Hall contemplates memory and inheritance in the ever-present shadow of war. Here are the first few lines:

The summer when I saw the Trylon and Perisphere,
I sat on the farm porch with my Great-Uncle Luther
who told me that when he was nine he watched
the soldier boys walking back home from Virginia.

See the full poem here, and go here to read more of Hall’s work for The Atlantic.

Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Song and Story,” from our May 1992 issue, begins with a poignant scene between a mother and her infant daughter:

The girl strapped in the bare mechanical crib
does not open her eyes, does not cry out.
The glottal tube is taped into her face;
bereft of sound, she seems so far away.
But a box on the stucco wall, wired to her chest,
televises the flutter of her heart—

news from the pit—her pulse rapid and shallow,
a rising line, except when her mother sings

Voigt returns to this moment again at the conclusion of the poem. But in the intervening stanzas she moves back and away from it, instead describing the mythical figure of Orpheus and his attempts to bring back his lost love with music. She links the two stories with a repeated refrain of

    old woman by the cradle, stringing beads
    old woman by the cradle, stringing beads

Voigt discussed the process of writing the poem in a November 1999 interview with The Atlantic:

“Song and Story” … began as a fragment—just the poem’s refrain … Then the refrain connected itself to a couple of those concentrated narrative “summaries”—the stanzas about Orpheus. And those concentrated narrative summaries occur inside a dramatic frame: the child in the hospital, in a crib, with a tube down her throat so she cannot speak. That frames the whole poem, which then tries to explore that occasion, but in neither a strictly narrative nor a strictly lyric way. A lyric would put the mother by the crib and have the mother speak. I have written such a poem. The narrative structure would follow how the child got there. It would bring the child to the hospital, raise the possibilities, then resolve them. And that would happen in time. What I wanted to do in “Song and Story” was some new third thing.

The result is a poem that’s emotionally and formally complex, a union of different and apparently contradictory elements—lyric and narrative styles, familial and mythic moments—that is more than the sum of its parts.

That impulse to break out of familiar forms and create something new has distinguished Voigt’s poetry throughout her long and variable literary career. Go here to find more of her poems in our archives.

The late Stanley Kunitz began his second tenure as U.S. poet laureate in 2000 at the age of 95. He remains the oldest person ever appointed to the role.

Five years before the appointment, our poetry editor, David Barber, praised Kunitz for continuing to produce remarkable work over the course of decades:

Stanley Kunitz … not only has continued to write poems of a startling richness at an advanced age but has arguably saved his best for last. …

Neither radical nor reactionary, answering to no mandarin aesthetic or modernist insurrection, Kunitz’s poetry has kept its own lonely counsels, austere of bearing and constrained in form, yet uninhibited in its depth of human sympathy and tragic feeling. What has emerged from this monkish discipline is poetry rooted in the American meditative vernacular and at the same time reaching back to an Old World oracular tradition of incantation and lamentation—that, and an unnerving strain of astringent grandeur that is entirely Kunitz's own.

One of my favorite Kunitz poems, “King of the River,” dates from roughly the middle of his long and extraordinary career. It exemplifies both the lonely austerity and the deep human sympathy that Barber identified in Kunitz’s work. In the poem, Kunitz grapples with the aging process as he watches a king salmon struggle against the current of a river. Here are a few lines:

If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.

Read the full poem from our July 1970 issue here. Or, to get a full sense of its incantatory rhythms and that “astringent grandeur,” listen to Kunitz read it to below.

When the doctor runs out of words and still
I won’t leave, he latches my shoulder and
steers me out doors.

So begins Lucia Perillo’s “The Body Mutinies,” from our February 1996 issue. Perillo passed away last October after decades of living with and writing about multiple sclerosis. She was diagnosed with the disease at the age of 30, and her awareness of her mortality and struggles with her failing body shaped her often humorous, often heartbreaking verse in the years that followed.

In “The Body Mutinies,” Perillo deals with the dazed realization of a new kind of life in the immediate aftermath of diagnosis with affecting simplicity and clarity. Here are a few more lines:

& me not griefstruck yet but still amazed: how
words and names—medicine’s blunt instruments—
undid me

Read the full poem here. Then, take a look at Perillo’s more metaphysical “Pharaoh,” from our October 2010 issue.