Some poems are best left on the page. That is, they don’t always work better when spoken aloud. Recitation is an art of its own, distinct from the craft of writing, and not all poets are good at both. But what a pleasure when you encounter one who is!

Listening to Duncan Wu read from his first collection, Origin Myths (Shearsman Books), at Georgetown University last month was a powerful experience. It took me back to the raw, unsentimental, and guttural language of Ted Hughes, which first turned me onto poetry. Wu is a Romantic scholar and the author of Wordsworth: An Inner Life. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that I was also reminded of William Wordsworth. You can hear both influences in his work. Take these opening lines from the title poem:

Ice flying upward, straight to the face, scalding,
blistering, blinding — for thousands of miles their
dogs hauled their lives from world to world to where
they found their ancestral dreamsite, halting

here, at this stream supplied by mountain springs.

Wu’s poems take us along the banks of Scott’s Run, which feeds the Potomac, with dog Dakota as a guide. The speaker visits a cabin and bathes in icy waters. He reflects on the tribes that once inhabited Northern Virginia, seems to hear them making tools, and sees them on a hilltop. He encounters deer and, in one long poem, “Sylvan Philosopher,” a fox:

              ...More than beast
only slightly less than god, he recounts
tales five centuries old of the deities
he has come to know — Humwawa, Pazuzu —
not doubting I will understand, though I do not.
Then, distracted, he snaps at the skydiving
mosquitoes round about his ears and growls.
He’s our philosopher for he knows both
what we are, and why. And other things that
make no sense to me.

I love how the muscularity of his language pushes against the constraints of form.

Yes, it’s old-fashioned. The formal elements employed in his verses, once the backbone of poetry, have been largely left behind as the artform has evolved. But Origin Myths demonstrates the power and beauty inherent in classical structures, and I found that enormously refreshing.

*****

This brings me to another origin myth, The Mayfly Codex (Spuyten Duyvil) by Marc Vincenz, refreshing in entirely different ways. Again, I was drawn to the poet’s work by listening to him recite it (in this case, on Grace Cavalieri’s podcast, “The Poet and the Poem”). Then, I received this little book and was immediately charmed by its fresh and compact design and its occasional use of red boldface type, through which you can follow a second embedded poem.

But that’s just one device Vincenz employs to overlap time. Another is the lyricism which binds disparate elements of past, present, and future.

We begin with the ephemeral mayfly going about its tiny aquatic life unobserved, having found “a seat at the Custodian’s table,” until the world dries up:

Fish and beaver skeletons adorned the shores
In their ivory plea; still the mayfly soared gracefully
Above the bramble, prickly pears and rose thorns.

We enter a dystopian landscape where water is scarce and a great unseeing glass eye watches all. The new custodians of this post-apocalyptic world are mechanical rats. The poem juxtaposes the short-lived mayfly with grand themes of authority, technology, and bleak futures. It’s a lot of fun. Also, very strange. Try these lines on for size:

And still, the mystery that we call the Great Unknown

Has been spilled, foamy and sanctified by the One
in the word of the Common Spirit, that each and all shall devour
the warm words served up with pork dumplings and cabbage stew.

Vincenz explains that “Inspiration was drawn from many sources: codices of various ancient cultures around the world, but also the writings of the Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem.” This tiny book continually unfolds, and with such authority — a puzzle of rich, surprising language.

*****

In Tablets: Secrets of the Clay (New Directions), Dunya Mikhail sets out to connect with her Sumerian ancestors through primitive drawings, which she then translates into resonant epigrammatic poems. She writes on a computer tablet, while her ancestors thousands of years ago wrote on tablets of clay. In an author’s note, she says, “I practiced at least two layers of translation in Tablets: the first from words in one language, Arabic, to another, English; and the second from words to images.”

As I read, I was startled by a sense of recognition, combined with a kind of yearning, a feeling which stayed with me throughout the collection.

The book is divided into 10 “tablets,” or sections, with 24 pieces in each. The drawings and accompanying verses are arranged pleasingly on the page, one or two together. The illustrations have a primitive quality sometimes embellished with Arabic words or symbols, while the verses are written in simple language which nevertheless rises to the level of poetry.

Tablets I begins with a shell:

She pressed her ear against the shell:
she wanted to hear everything
he never told her.

Mikhail has used the shell as a metaphor for poetry in her earlier work, and she returns to it in the final tablet:

I need a seashell
to hear the chatter of the girls
as we walked home from school,
the clamor and claps as we jumped
on the hopscotch squares,
traces of chalks still on our hands.

Many pieces touch on losses imposed by exile, the loss of homeland and loved ones among them. The poems reconnect her, often through nature. Open the book at any page and scoop out a cupful of wisdom, such as this from Tablets I:

On the first morning
Of the new year
All of us will look up
At the same sun.

And from Tablets III:

Of course you can’t see the word love.
I wrote it on water.

Tablets IX centers on poetry itself. Let’s finish with this one:

Poetry is how the fish discovers
The third shore of the river.

Tablets: Secrets of the Clay takes us to that third shore, honors our losses, and releases them to swim in eternal waters.

Amanda Holmes Duffy is a columnist and poetry editor for the Independent and the voice of “Read Me a Poem,” a podcast of the American Scholar.