A Review of The World Has Need of You: Poems for Connection
The World Has Need of You: Poems for Connection, published by Copper Canyon Press with an introduction by Alberto Rios, is a poetry anthology designed to confront and alleviate the various spiritual and psychological damages, derangements, and run-of-the-mill discomforts induced by the COVID-19 epidemic. Taken in the collective, the poems are offered as a kind of poetic prescription for the unique tincture of anxiety that months upon months of lockdown, quasi-quarantine, and global pandemic affected upon our collective psyches—effects which, for most if not all, have yet to fully (or even marginally) dissipate. As Rios says in his introduction, “[p]oets feed us. They look where there seems to be nothing to see, and they see. They see and they report, sometimes rashly, sometimes elegantly, sometimes in ways that have no name.” The book is, in its way, something offered to all those left still mentally or spiritually “hungry” from the COVID-19 experience.
Setting aside the armchair psychology, as a collection/anthology of poetry, The World Has Need of You proves a rich and varied collection of verse well worth the shelf space for any ardent reader of poetry. At first glance, the book appears to be a collection sourced exclusively from the works of contemporary poets; however, upon closer inspection, works by Vincente Alexiandre, Lao-Tzu, and Pablo Neruda slipped in among Ocean Vuong, Gregory Orr, and Heather McHughtheir and others of their poetic descendants. When read as an entire book and thus experienced as a contiguous whole, the shift to a voice from the past, even the distant and seemingly remote past—Rumi, the renowned Sufi poet and mystic of the thirteenth century, has an entry—never as though it belongs to an antiquated world too remote and too strange to be our own. Loneliness, apocalypse, and the deep longing for human touch and spiritual connection, it seems, do not change with time.
As all of the poems have been intentionally selected from the annals of well-known works written and published by well-known poets, there is little to say in terms of quality; all are unsurprisingly excellent individually, and in their selection and arrangement, Copper Canyon Press has achieved their stated design of publishing a “slender anthology [which] represents a coming together or imaginations and aspirations.” Even for the most voracious reader of poetry who finds themselves previously familiar with every entry in the index will have never experienced them arranged in their sequence in which each entry derives a novel and frequently poignant shade of meaning from its position in the sequence, affecting and being affected by all of the other poems surrounding it. All of which makes The World Has Need of You: Poems for Connection easy to recommend without reservation.
