A Year of Reading: Best Poetry of 2015

Poetry forms the core of my well-being. I begin each day by reading two to four poems, cleansing my brain first thing in the morning with compressed stanzas sturdy as bars of soap. I recommend this kind of ablution to everyone. (Of course, verse is perfectly acceptable for noontime or eventide reading as well.)

This year, my poetry reading was dominated by Edna St. Vincent Millay. While reading Savage Beauty , Nancy Milford’s first-class biography of the early 20th-century poet (as well as a t...