April is National Poetry month, something we get pretty excited about here at the Harvard Book Store. If you have time, take a walk by the store. Every day this month we will display a new poem in the window, all favorites of our staff. Each morning I am newly delighted by a poetry gem. Our front display features poetry books, including some that are part of this month's Select Seventy Spotlight on Poetry. Since we couldn't fit every deserving title in the display or Spotlight, I will highlight two wonderful poetry books by local authors and you can see an even broader selection of recent poetry titles on the right.

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Ecco Press, pb, $12.95

Cambridge author Louise Gluck has won the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Bobbitt National Poetry Prize, and the Ambassador's Award for her poetry, as well as the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her book Vita Nova won the first annual New Yorker Readers Award.

Publishers Weekly wrote of The Seven Ages, her ninth book of poetry, "Careful scenes, queries and moments of self-analysis throughout the volume investigate time: the ways in which we change in the course of a lifetime; the ways our minds change from moment to moment; and the ways in which time changes everything, creating 'a world in process/ of shifting, of being made or dissolved,/ and yet we didn't live that way.' Considering age and aging, summer and fall, 'stasis' and constant loss, Gluck's new poems often forsake the light touch of her last few books for the grim wisdom she sought in the 1980s; at the same time, her lines on herself, young and old, and on these stages for her sister and herself, are frequently wise, densely crafted meditations on the odd possibility of 'actual human growth.'" Published by Ecco Press, a division of HarperCollins, this new paperback costs $12.95.

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W. W. Norton, pb, $15.95

Stanley Kunitz lives in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. His most recent honors include the Harvard Centennial Medal (1992), the National Medal of Arts (1993), and an "In Celebration of Writers" award from Poets and Writers (1999).

Booklist wrote of The Collected Poems, published in hardcover in October 2000 and released in paperback this month, "Kunitz, appointed U.S. poet laureate at age 95, says that he only writes poetry when poems demand to be written, but even from his earliest works, republished here for the first time in decades, he has been both bard and contemplative, writing authoritatively of public matters as well as expressing deeply private visions. To read this collection of 70 years of exacting, metaphysically inquiring, and consistently lithe, beautiful, and moving poetry is to trace the evolution of a century and one man's spirit and sensibility. In his first book, Kunitz was tentatively feeling his way into the cosmos. By the time his second book was published, his voice had been toughened by grappling with 'man's madness,' the bloody blossoming of the Second World War, and his tropes acquire a scientific precision, albeit without diminishment of his warm and ebullient lyricism. As the poet grows, so does his fascination with time, the relics that resist its erosion, and the friction between memories, dreams, and knowledge. And always Kunitz writes of love with wondering inventiveness." This paperback published by W.W. Norton is priced at $15.95.