The Night Stand Game

HOLLYWOOD has been boosting sales in a very unlikely area: poetry books. Sales of two poetry books, one by Elizabeth Bishop and another by E.E. Cummings, more than doubled in some stores in the last month after actress Cameron Diaz read works by the two great American poets in the movie "In Her Shoes."

WHAT are you reading? An inventory of my night stand currently has the following:

• Early Occult Memory System of the Lower Midwest - B.H. Fairchild
• Conamara Blues - Poems - John O'Donohue
• The Poetry of Pope John Paul II - Roman Triptych Meditations
• A Company of Readers - W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lional Trilling
• Her Husband - Hughes and Plath - A Marriage - Diane Middlebrook
• Sylvia Plath - A Critical Study - Tim Kendall
• Wintering - Kate Moses
• Oh Sweet Dancer - W.B. Yeats and Margot Ruddoch Correspondence - Roger McHugh
• John Ashbery - Selected Poems - John Ashbery
• The Best American Poetry 2005 - edited by Robert Pinsky

The last book... I picked it up at Barnes & Noble yesterday while browsing there with my wife. Cathy brought it to me and I flipped through it and proclaimed it a gem! The irony of this is that poetry is not really her thing. It has a really good and quite varied selection from a number of very outstanding journals. That I recall off the top of my head - The Hudson Review, Poetry, Sycamore Review, Slate, Ploughshares, New Letters, 32 Poems, Fence and of course The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly just to name a few.

So, what's on your night stand?

Poetry