Kindness to snails: Break of day / Galway Kinnell -- Happiness / Raymond Carver -- This morning / Jane Kenyon -- Monks of St. John's file in the prayer / Kilian McDonnell -- Job / William Baer -- Or death and December / George Garrett -- Sonnet: "Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight" / Gavin Ewart -- Little horse is new / E.E. Cummings -- Poem for Emily / Miller Williams -- For a five-year-old / Fleur Adcock -- For my daughter in reply to a question / David Ignatow -- Goose / Muriel Spark -- Starting the Subaru at five below / Stuart Kestenbaum -- Day bath / Debra Spencer -- Such as it is more or less: Dialogue of watching / Kenneth Rexroth -- Birthday / W.S. Merwin -- Thoughts in a garden / Andrew Marvell -- Spring / Mary Oliver -- Unharvested / Robert Frost -- State of the economy / Louis Jenkins -- Arraignment / Debra Spencer -- From "song of myself" / Walt Whitman -- Ice storm / Jane Kenyon -- Passengers / Billy Collins -- Summer-camp bus pulls away from the curb / Sharon Olds -- You can take it with out / Josephine Jacobsen -- To David, about his education / Howard Nemerov -- Invitation / Carl Dennis -- Calling him back from layoff / Bob Hicok -- Working in the rain / Robert Morgan -- My father's lunch / Erica Funkhouser -- This lust of tenderness: Happiest day / Linda Pastan -- 'After dark vapours have oppressed our plains' / John Keats -- Children's hospital, emergency room / Gregory Djanikian -- Lonely-weds know / Leah Furnas -- In answer to your query / Naomi Lazard -- Toast / Leonard Nathan -- Detail waiting for a train / Stanley Plumly -- September twelfth, 2001 / X.J. Kennedy -- Alter / Charles Simic -- Sonnet no. 6 dearest, I never know such loving / Hayden Carruth -- There comes the strangest moment / Kate Light -- Snowflake / William Baer -- Somewhere I'll find you / Phebe Hanson -- Feasting / Elizabeth W. Garber -- Song / W.H. Auden -- Yes / Catherine Doty -- Dalliance of the eagles / Walt whitman -- After love / Maxine Kumin -- Sonnet CVI: When in the chronicle of wasted time / William Shakespeare -- Deliberate Obfuscation: Spiral notebook / Ted Kooser -- What's in my journal / William Stafford -- Why I took good care of my Macintosh / Gary Snyder -- Ode to my 1977 Toyota / Barbara Hamby -- Internal exile / Richard Cecil -- Burma-Shave -- Carnation milk / Anonymous -- Brief lecture on door closers / Clements Starck -- Sonnet Xll: Why are we by all creatures waited on? / John Donne -- Angels / Maurva Simon -- Passing through a small town / David Shumate -- In Paris with you / James Fenton -- Wedding poem for Schele and Phi / Bill Holm -- Sound of a car: Seven deadly sins / Virginia Hamilton Adair -- Teaching a child the art of confession / David Shumate -- Physics / Heather McHugh -- Things / Lisel Mueller -- Any prince to any princess / Adrian Henri -- Courage that my mother had / Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Please Mrs Butler / Allan Ahlberg -- To a frustrated poet / R.J. Ellmann / Lesson of the moth / Don Marquis -- Disappointment / Tony Hoagland -- Cure / Ginger Andrews -- Upon hearing about the suicide of the daughter of friends / Jo McDougall -- Here it comes: Con job / Charles Bukowski -- Farewell to A' our Scottish fame / Robert Burns -- Easter morning / Jim Harrison -- Million young workmen, 1915 / Carl Sandburg -- College colonel / Herman Melville -- Ordinary life / Barbara Crooker -- Fight aloud, is very brave / Emily Dickinson -- Analysis of baseball / May Swenson -- Ode to American English / Barbara Hamby -- High water mark / David Shumate -- After school on ordinary days / Maria Mazziotti Gillan -- Snow in the suburbs / Thomas Hardy -- Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion -- Happiness / Michael Van Walleghen -- From tender buttons / Gertrude Stein -- Classic ballroom dances / Charles Simic -- Theater / William Greenway -- Ode on the whole duty of parents / Frances Cornford: Benefits of ignorance / Hal Sirowitz -- Bunthiorne's song / W.S. Gilbert -- Rules of evidence / Lee Robinson -- Courtesy / Hilaire Belloc -- What the uneducated old woman told me / Christopher Reid -- Proverbs of hell / William Blake -- To a daughter leaving home / Linda Pastan -- No longer a teenager / Gerald Locklin -- Prayer / Galway Kinnell -- Minnesota Thanksgiving / John Berryman -- Berryman / W.S. Merwin -- Mother, in love at sixty / Susanna Styve -- My agent says / R.S. Gwynn -- Afraid so / Jeanne Marie Beaumont -- Yak / Hilaire Belloc -- High plains farming / William Notter -- Fish / Elizabeth Bishop -- Future / Wesley McNair -- Riveted / Robyn Sarah -- All that time / May Swenson -- My husband discovers poetry / Diane Lockeward -- Poet's occasional alternative / Grace Paley -- Unsaid / Stephen Dunn -- Snapshot of a lump / Kelli Russell Agodon -- Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness / John Donne -- Last days / Donald Hall -- Let it spill: Thelonious Monk / Stephen Dobyns -- Discovery of sex / Debra Spencer -- Lawyer / Carl Sandburg -- Prodigal son's brother / Steve Kowit -- Calling your father / Robert Bly -- Al and Beth / Louis Simpson -- Meeting / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- Nothing is lost / Noel Coward -- Planet on the table / Wallace Stevens -- It is raining on the house of Ann Frank / Linda Pastan -- Sunlight on the garden / Louis MacNeice -- Too sweet / CharlesBukowski -- For my sister, emigrating / Wendy Cope -- Three Kings / Muriel Spark -- Not only the Eskimos / Lisel Mueller -- Where go the boats / Robert Louis Stevenson -- Parade / Billy Collins -- My cup / Robert Friend -- Affirmation / Donald Hall -- Singing Voice / Kenneth Rexroth -- Since you asked / Lawrence Raab -- Inviting a friend to supper / Ben Johnson -- Love cook / Ron Padgett -- Soda crackers / Raymond Carver -- That silent evening / Galway Kinnell -- This is how memory works / Patricia Hampl -- "Purpose of time is to prevent everything from happening at once" / X.J. Kennedy -- I feel our kinship: Death mask / Edward Field -- That's the sum of it / David Ignatow -- Suck it up / Paul Zimmer -- Day the tree fell down / Jack LaZebnik -- White autumn / Robert Morgan -- Naked / Jennifer Michael Hecht -- Slow children at play / Cecilia Woloch -- Driving to town late to mail a letter / Robert Bly -- My brother's in Wyoming. / Gary Young -- My brother / Denver Butson -- Still life / Carl Sandburg -- Changing light / Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- Fishhouses / Elizabeth Bishop -- Man in Main / Philip Booth -- War in the air / Howard Nemerov -- In the middle / Barbara Crooker -- Are you tired of me, my darling?/ On a night of snow / Elizabeth Coatsworth -- Closing in on the harvest / Leo Dangel -- Reconciliation / Walt Whitman -- Tie the strings to my life, my Lord / Emily Dickinson -- Last waltz / Alden Nowlan -- Rye Whiskey / Let old Nellie stay / In praise of my bed / Meredith Holmes -- Poem for the family / Susan Cataldo -- In bed with a book / Mona Van Duyn -- My father gets up in the middle of the night to watch an old movie / Dennis Trudell -- Prayer in the prospect of death / Robert Burns -- Diner / Louis Jenkins -- When death comes /Mary Oliver -- My funeral / Willis Barbstone -- Wish to be generous / Wendell Berry -- Last poem / Ted Berrigan -- Simpler than I could find words for: Just now / W.S. Merwin -- Psalm 51/ Dawn revisited / Rita Dove -- Crossing the bar / Alford, Lord Tennyson -- Morning swim / Maxine Kumin -- Biographies -- Author Index -- Title Index.;Presents a collection of inspirational poems by such authors as Emily Dickinson, Billy Collins, Robert Frost, and Raymond Carver.