When I was hired by Carleton College, back in the dim mists of the 1980s, I had spent years as a nearly penniless, bibliophilic graduate student. Yes, it was nice finally to be able to buy groceries and to have health insurance and to have work I was good at that mattered, but the most exciting benefit came as a surprise: a well-curated bookstore, right on campus, that offered a substantial discount as well as a bookstore-specific charge account.

Those first few months were heady, indeed! Who cared that I might be in danger of owing my soul to the company store? I began to acquire books I had only ever been able to borrow from the library, such as all of the titles by Laura Ingalls Wilder and A. A. Milne. Under the guidance of Barbara Bonner, I augmented my purchases (from a previous two-year stint at the University Book Store in Madison, Wisconsin) of all of the Barbara Pym novels with more contemporary fiction. And some purchases were simply impulse buys.

The volume above falls into that category. It has, nonetheless continued to surprise me with its ongoing relevance and excitement after more than four decades in my library. Judiciously yet whimsically juxtaposing images from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with classic and contemporary poetry, and arranged by topics congenial to all ages, poets Koch and Farrell created a jewel box setting for poems and paintings to converse with each other. Such pairings as Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sleeping on the Ceiling” with “Untitled,” Jerry Uelsmann’s surreal gelatin silver photograph of 1976 or “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter (after Li Po) by Ezra Pound with a Chinese scroll from thirteenth century titled “Wang Hsi-chih Watching Geese” agument each other while each element retains its distinctiveness. For all the windows it continues to open in my mind, this lavish collection is a keeper.

Context for My Poem, “Spring Snow”:

Today’s small poem, “Spring Snow,” draws from recent garden notes.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE