Spring update: 30 poets, 71 poems

Vast sky, sky blue. Placid dry ocean
sky. I count four cirrus clouds.
I open every window I have
wide. Spring air races through rooms:
a joyous child.

—Michael Kleber-Diggs, "Source of My Confidence"

Flowers are blooming, birds are flitting, and warm breezes are wafting in country lanes and city windows: here in the Northern Hemisphere, spring has arrived! We're marking the occasion with a garland of 71 poems, all new to our poetry archive. Read on to encounter work from 30 exceptional poets, gathered here just for you.

We're excited to add poems by seven fine contemporary poets to our site for the first time this spring, writing from the United States, India, and Ireland:

• Rick Barot - "A Poem as Long as California," "The Galleons 4," "The Names," "Virginia Woolf's Walking Stick"
• Tishani Doshi - "Find the Poets"
• Vona Groarke - "Away," "Call Waiting," "For the Unkept House"
• Fady Joudah - "Aries," "House of Mercury," "Mimesis," "Syzygy"
• Michael Kleber-Diggs - "Every Mourning," "Source of My Confidence"
• Margaret Noodin - "Bangan Zoogipoog / Silent Snowfall," "Jiikimaadizi / A Joyful Life," "Naabibii'aan Agoodeg / Tracing Balance," "Umpaowastewin / Daybreak Woman"
• Jeet Thayil - "Spiritus Mundi"

And nine great poets of the past are also newly represented in our poetry archive, who worked from the 18th century through the 1990s:

• Gwendolyn Brooks - "The Bean Eaters," "First fight. Then fiddle," "the rites for Cousin Vit," "The Second Sermon on the Warpland"
• William Cowper - "The Poplar Field"
• Maurice English - "The Flowing World," "The Key," "Omega," "Wading In," "The Weaving," "What Happens Is This"
• Denise Levertov - "In California During the Gulf War," "The Metier of Blossoming"
• Agnes Maule Machar - "The Coming of the Spring"
• Thomas Moore - "Oft, in the Stilly Night (Scotch Air)," "Oh, no—not ev’n when first we lov’d"
• John Crowe Ransom - "Blue Girls," "Emily Hardcastle, Spinster," "The Lover"
• Adrienne Rich - "Diving into the Wreck," "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve," "What Kind of Times Are These"
• James Stephens - "The Goat Paths"

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring"

Keep journeying down the garden path to find fresh poems by poets we've already featured, including three contemporary poets and 11 voices from the past:

• Richard Blanco - "Island Body"
• Countee Cullen - "Threnody for a Brown Girl," "Two Thoughts of Death"
• Angelica Weld Grimké - "A Mona Lisa," "When the Green Lies Over the Earth," "Your Hands"
• A. D. Hope - "The Death of the Bird"
• Gerard Manley Hopkins - "Spring"
• Langston Hughes - "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "Theme for English B"
• Hannah Lowe - "Players"
• Derek Mahon - "Courtyards in Delft," "Everything Is Going to Be All Right," "September in Great Yarmouth," "Spring in Belfast"
• A. E. Stallings - "Ajar"
• Wallace Stevens - "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"
• J. M. Synge - "The Curse," "Prelude," "To the Oaks of Glencree"
• Derek Walcott - "Midsummer XXVII," "A Sea-Chantey," "The Schooner Flight: 11: After the Storm," "Upstate"
• Dorothy Wordsworth - "Grasmere - A Fragment," "Thoughts on My Sick-Bed"
• W. B. Yeats - "Politics," "The Choice"

Please enjoy this bouquet of poetic blooms as you make your way through spring and the seasons to come!