Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (A Norton Short)

Former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith has managed a rather challenging feat: she’s written a book for poetry lovers and those just dipping their toes into the poetry pool. Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times can be read, understood, and enjoyed by anyone.

I’m a poet, and I teach poetry courses, so there’s a great deal here for people like me. In-depth studies of poems like Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”—one of the most anthologized American poems—lend themselves to individual study as well as class discussions. But the genius of Smith’s work lies in the fact that you don’t have to write poetry or teach it to see what she’s doing. She breaks the work down in terms of word choice, musicality, and the speaker’s intention, but there’s plenty of framework regarding what those things mean to make the poem accessible to all.

In the latter chapters, she works with other recognizable poets: Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Spencer, to name a few. In doing so, this book becomes an entry point for those just beginning to read poetry while also writing with enough depth to engage the poetically devoted. The real strength, though, of Fear Less lies in the personal moments when Smith’s own observations and process come to the foreground. In the final chapter, Be Not Afraid, she writes, “Poetry is a place writers go not to deposit meaning, but to seek it out.”

If you’ve ever found yourself looking to poetry in that way, or you’d like to try to, //Fear Less// is an exceptional companion on that journey.