As a result of this ontological bounty, Ashbery has been categorized, during his 50 years as one of America’s “famous” poets, as difficult. He doesn’t write autobiographical or confessional poems in the traditional sense. He assumes numerous personas, skipping around from “I” to “he” to “you” with almost reckless abandon. When this approach works, it’s whimsical and charming, delivering a great wallop of emotion by capturing what is universal in human experience but refusing to view it from a single perspective. When it doesn’t, it produces poems so oblique as to be frustrating, poems that, because they seem like nonsense, seem slight as well.

“Your Name Here,” Ashbery’s 21st book of verse, contains both kinds of poems. It tends more toward the palpably emotional than many of his previous collections, perhaps because he’s reached an age that precipitates stock-taking. Still, he can’t help reminding us that it’s a mistake to look to poetry for philosophical answers. Even the title of the book implies that we shouldn’t take Ashbery too seriously. Like so much of his work, the phrase “Your Name Here” is at once inclusive and self-effacing, the very mix that allows him to offer wisdom between the lines, as it were, of even his most perplexing poems. For example, a piece called “The Water Inspector” begins: “Scramble the ‘Believer’ buttons. Silence the chickens. We have more important things, like intelligence.” What the hell is he talking about? Right when you’re ready to throw the book down in annoyance, however, Ashbery comes in for the save with such grace that confusion is banished: “We say so many cruel things in a lifetime, and yet. In a whorehouse, young, I obfuscated. Destiny was this and that, no it was about this and that. Do you see what I’m saying? Nobody needs the whole truth.”

As in life, a larger revelation makes what comes before it obsolete. But just as you won’t find out any more truth than you need to in life, you won’t find out who Ashbery is from reading this book. There is the occasional sign: The book and one poem in it are dedicated to a former lover, and there is a mention of Ashbery’s brother, who died when they were both boys, but mostly the poet tries on a whole crowd of personalities here, playing dodge-’em with his readers. Among them is a Scandinavian man reflecting on his childhood in one of the collection’s most enigmatic and incandescent pieces. “They Don’t Just Go Away, Either” begins with a fairy-tale opener:

In Scandinavia, where snow falls frequently
in winter, then lies around for quite some time,
lucky cousins were living in a time-vault of sorts.

and continues on to a rather astonishing image of the constant, inevitable evolution of a life:

More fanciful patterns await us further along
in our destiny, I tell him, and he agrees; anything
to be rid of me and on to the next customer.
Outside, in the street, a length of silk unspools beautifully,
rejoicing in its doom.

It’s a gorgeous moment, and there are many others here as well. In particular, a tiny poem called “Stanzas Before Time” is a perfect embodiment of Ashbery’s power to make us accept his ambiguities simply by overwhelming us with the generosity of his heart:

Quietly as if it could be
otherwise, the ocean turns
and slinks back into her panties.

Reefs must know something of this,
and all the incurious red fish
that float ditsily in schools,

wondering which school is best.
I’d take you for a drive
in my flivver, Miss Ocean, honest, if I could.

Do you know what a flivver is? Probably not, but it doesn’t really matter because when Ashbery writes “honest,” you can tell he means it with all its attendant longing. In fact, honesty is what Ashbery aims for and what makes him admirable. Sure, he’s not telling the whole story of his life for the world to gape at, but what he puts down is all true somehow. In this way, reading an Ashbery poem is also a little bit like being let loose inside a house of mirrors — things don’t always make sense on the surface, but on some gut level, you know you’re still looking at yourself, which is about as much as you can hope for. As the poet himself writes:

We should all be so lucky as to get hit by the meteor
of an idea once in our lives. It would save a lot of hand-wringing
and bells tolling in the undersea cathedral,
a noise to drive one mad, past the brink of human decency.
Please don’t tell me it all adds up in the end. I’m sick of that one.

Welcome to the fun house.

Or at least that’s the main contention of Belinda Jack’s new biography, “George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large.” Born Aurore Dupin in 1804 to an aristocratic father and an unstable working-class mother, Sand was immediately thrust into a world of paradox and conflict. Her paternal grandmother, with whom she lived after her father’s early death, disapproved of her parents’ marriage and of Sand’s mother’s encouragement of her daughter’s dreaminess. Battles over class and upbringing on the home front produced in Aurore a tendency to turn inward toward fantasy. As she wrote in her autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” “I inherited from my parents that secret wildness which makes the world difficult to bear.” Even as a young child her gift for expression was apparent; she spent hours telling her pet rabbit fairy tales, and went so far as to invent a “god” of her own, an androgynous being named Corambe. A kind of precursor to Sand’s libertine adult life, Corambe “was without sex and was clothed in all sorts of different disguises … He would become man or woman.”

Though she was initially given the same education as her half-brother Hippolyte and was allowed to dress like a boy at home, Sand soon succumbed to her predetermined role and, after a stint at a convent, married at the age of 18. As the marriage foundered, she turned back to her childhood love of stories and, according to Jack, realized not only that writing was a way to gain financial independence but that it would “no longer translate life into words but offer new interpretations, new scenarios that she might one day dare to live out.” Her work began to serve as a kind of laboratory for her life, and vice versa. “How good it is to turn life into a novel,” she once commented. And, toward the end of her life: “I will die with my shoulder to the wheel.”

What a lot of life there was before then, though. Jack traces Sand’s development from oppressed wife to one of Paris’ most famous, or infamous, writers. She seems never to have slept; the amazing pace of her love affairs was matched only by the books she churned out with astonishing regularity, often because she was broke and needed to support her two children. Perhaps her most touching love affair, however, was with the freedom she found wearing men’s clothes, which allowed her to travel unnoticed in the streets of Paris as well as to attend the theater cheaply by sitting in the stalls. Here is Sand’s own assessment of her relationship to her hobnailed men’s boots, which she wore with a top hat and overcoat: “I would willingly have slept with them, as my brother did when he was very little, when he was given his first pair. With their little metal heels I was firmly grounded on the pavement.”

Other parts of her life, alas, were not so firmly grounded. She bounced from lover to lover, including an affair with a great actress of the day, Marie Dorval (of whom she said, upon seeing her onstage, “It is as though I am watching my soul”). Sand was always searching for someone to help her fulfill her ideal conception of love. All the while, she folded her experiences into the novels and “letters” that earned her a literary reputation. By the time she died in 1876, she had written countless novels, plays and essays, and 25 volumes of correspondence to boot. She drew fire from Nietzsche and Baudelaire; Flaubert broke down at her funeral; and she met with Napoleon III, whom she greatly admired, to plead for the release of political prisoners.

Jack has managed to crush all of this, and plenty more, into her book, which is an admirable feat. What’s peculiar, though, is that for all the descriptions of her exploits and passions, Sand never takes on a life of her own in Jack’s treatment. The events are listed with precision, the heartbreaks and triumphs are recorded, but Jack’s writing is far too analytical to let any real light shine through. Perhaps this can be explained by Jack’s somewhat distressing confession in her introduction that she was “often … disconcerted, while writing this life, by a sense that Sand had not one but many lives.” Undoubtedly Sand did, but then, so does anyone with any inner life at all, and that understanding seems crucial to writing a biography that does more than recount the chronology of an existence. In her efforts to write something “large,” as her book’s subtitle proclaims, Jack has pinned down George Sand’s life, but left her spirit to languish.

One of the book’s most satisfying poems in this vein is “Eclipse, Eclipse,” in which an appropriately creepy horseman appears on the horizon over and over again, a grim reaper arriving to claim a world balanced perilously on the edge of death:

Sickness was near. All the gods knew it.

The air had been sprayed with the stiff sheen

of daybreak: a curtain fluttering; a window gone dim.

Not that the gods wanted it this way.

Their tent was cold, too. They knelt on the gravel

pondering the sky from which they long ago fell.

Who would carry the foul fumes away?

I kept an apple for Mother but ate the charred skins.

Comes a horseman, lazy on his mount,

helmeted in steel, rising from the pitted field.

The cosmic order of the universe has clearly been compromised, and this horseman — one can’t help thinking of William Butler Yeats’ famous rider, whom he commanded to “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./ Horseman, pass by!” — is moving in to complete the damage. Levine continues:

The gods are not well braced. Their sleeves are

tattered and their flaring rockets

lie disabled by vandals.

Delay is all; all matrimony, plasma,

tokens of esteem, all vows exchanged in the cold heavens …

The law is coming, three battered islands hence;

the splash is coming, the radar is coming, the law

is coming wearing Mother’s private wig.

Comes a horseman, steady on the climb, a blade

against his thigh, a rumor on his spine.

“Eclipse, Eclipse” finishes out with a final flourish in the direction of its dark prince:

A pencil in his glove and a shovel in his soul

and big plans for a secret farm: comes a horseman.

In other poems, strange, moldering materials accrue into rotting piles. We get “The strain of heat. The wounded green/fabric, the thinking, the wan starling/crumpling into a stray eastbound train.” Elsewhere, in one of the lists for which Levine seems to have a great fondness, we get a collection that has, like so much of “Enola Gay,” a faint whiff of the plague about it: “Brine. Tweezers. Surrender. Rain.” Just who or what is surrendering to the machinations of those briny tweezers? And why is the cleansing rain so necessary? There is also a garden “choked to its seams/with weeds and coiled roots and vines lurching,” about which Levine asks, “Can you hear the crystal voices trapped beneath the growing?”

Not every poem in “Enola Gay” bears up under the enormous, melancholy burden Levine places on his work. He’s not at his best when telling a straightforward story, as he does on several occasions here, trying to imbue it with deep meaning by pinning on some kind of moral or coda. In the more abstract poems, he runs into trouble when the things he gathers together fail to add up into a whole. This is perhaps no surprise, since Levine is a protigi of Jorie Graham, famed for her lush but occasionally incomprehensible offerings, but it can be frustrating, especially since some of the poems in which Levine hits the mark are lovely amid the pervading gloom. Indeed, they provide some necessary relief from the heaviness of “Enola Gay,” which can be a bit much at times. One in particular, “The Holy Pail,” has a great delicacy that shines forth from the muck:

The holy pail. The mint of the colony.

The radiant fuel. The arrow. The wheel.

The bevel. The palm. The increase. The warp.

The tiller. The rut. The imaginary island.

The cathedral afloat. The prospering mercury.

The silo. The wish. The entrance. The rung.

The zero. The dome. The terminal carpentry.

The blighted soprano. The damning. The slack.

The hunting of mushrooms. The frozen instruction.

The breeze in the wardrobe. The silver. The silver.

The cracked archipelago. The eyesight. The law.

The pillar. The shift. The impeccable prey.

The valuable memory. The greed of the foliage.

The worry. The servant. The shovel. The like.

The emergency precinct. The motor. The milk.

The mother. The matter. The fabric. The fold.

The poem reads like a periodic table — a guide to the elements of human life, complete with danger and longing. Elsewhere the poet poses the question: “Who doesn’t love intrigue? Contagion?” The point being that even those of us who deny our fascination with the forces that push our lives ceaselessly toward death can’t squelch our morbid curiosity entirely. As Levine rightly guesses, his book is attractive precisely because it provides evidence that everything, eventually, returns to ashes and dust.

The book is called “On City Streets” and it sold for a whopping 75 cents. Its cover has a photo of a boy sitting in the street, drawing with chalk, and the book is subtitled “A Remarkable Collection of Poems and Photographs That Captures the Heart and Soul of the City and Its people.” In the pages of this anthology, I discovered a poem by someone named Patricia Hubbell that enchanted me in a way nothing ever had before:

“Joralemon Street”

We walked in the street on Joralemon Street.

(Geraniums white and geraniums pink

Brightened the flats on Joralemon Street.)

The sun rode the brownstones

A short pace away.

And turned before setting the night on the day

To wave us a shadow that banded the street.

(Geraniums guarded Joralemon Street.)

He slid from the housetops

And hurried away

Leaving night in his place on the husk of the day,

And we walked in the shadows along the dark street

And knew how geraniums smell in the dusk.

The poem’s primary fascination for me was the word “Joralemon,” which I pronounced (incorrectly) “JOR-a-LE-mon,” like the citrus fruit. I didn’t know and didn’t care where this street was, or even if it was real — it existed in my head.

But, as is the case with all objects of affection, the mystery was due to unravel at some point. Years later, exiting the subway in Brooklyn, N.Y., to visit one of my other first loves, a boy this time, I found myself on Joralemon Street. I can’t help thinking that this was no coincidence. The odd thing was that the poem came back instantly, overpowering the reality of what was in front of me. It was winter, but I could almost smell geraniums in the air. Though I hadn’t opened it in some time, I had held onto “On City Streets,” and I’ve continued to cart it around since, feeling that its presence in the many homes I’ve made is somehow essential to my existence not only as a poet but as a person. Though “Joralemon Street” isn’t the best poem ever written, not by a long shot, it’s a marker of my entry into language. Even now, when I should supposedly know better, when I read Rainer Maria Rilke and T.S. Eliot and I know how to pronounce “Jo-RAL-emon,” I can’t quite seem to get over it — the mark of a truly searing affair.

These, then, were my beginnings as a writer, and in light of this rather humble first love of mine, I was nothing short of delighted when I received a copy of “First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems that Captivated and Inspired Them,” edited by Carmela Ciuraru. Amid the crashing din of National Poetry Month, when publishing houses produce a small landslide of new books, many of them quite wonderful, but far too many to pay attention to all at once, what a joy to be presented with this one, modest book that gets right to the heart of the matter. It responds to the eternal question, the one that always pops up at readings: How do great poets start to become poets? Who, and where, were they when they felt those early stirrings of verse?

There are, of course, any number of false, pretentious ways to answer this question. Often people who have been in the limelight for a long time lose their capacity to come out of it, even for a moment. Amazingly, however, Ciuraru has coaxed some of the world’s most revered poets into admitting that they didn’t spring from the womb reciting Shakespeare and Shelley and Stevens. Even those who did have the presence of mind to fall in love with great poets right off the bat are not entirely sure why it happened.

Eavan Boland, one of Ireland’s best contemporary poets, selected W.B. Yeats’ gorgeous “The Wild Swans at Coole” for “First Loves.” Certainly this shows signs of precocious taste, but she doesn’t claim bragging rights, instead recalling her confused teenage self riding the bus to buy the “Collected Poems.” She wasn’t, she tells us quite candidly, “a particularly bookish teenager. And so I remember the long bus journey — the sight of the coast when I was leaving and returning, the bracelet of lights in the distance toward Bray — much better than why I went to buy the book.” There were no lightning bolts for Boland, no moment of revelation. She wasn’t even Yeats’ “inevitable reader. I was hardly more than a stranded teenager, home from London and New York, back in Ireland after years away at the supremely inconvenient moment of 14 years. Unable to name the country I came from … I felt awkward — an impostor.”

When Boland finally comes up with the reason she loved, and continues to love, Yeats, it’s anything but erudite. In fact, it concerns the most fundamental of human instincts — the need to belong. In Yeats’ words, Boland writes, she “began to hear something different — the sound, at last, of a place where I might no longer be an impostor. A place that could be made exact in language and therefore hospitable to the very degrees of estrangement I felt.” She makes loving poetry, even becoming a poet, a matter of creating a home in the world.

Boland’s numbers among the more serious entries here. There are also some wonderfully glib responses from people who gleefully chucked dignity out the door and simply told the truth. We get A.R. Ammons as a fifth-grader, memorizing a distinctly grade-schoolish poem called “In Flanders Fields” not because it stirred him but because he wanted the apple his teacher was giving away to the first person who could complete the task. “I don’t know that I loved the poem then,” he writes, “but I loved the apple and gradually, I suppose, associated that with poetry.” (Incidentally, there are various English teachers mentioned in the anthology, all of them with fabulous names — Ammons’ was Viola Smith, and Philip Levine remembers a certain Miss Tarbox. Perhaps the real key to becoming a poet is having a teacher with the right kind of name.)

Even many of the writers who’ve selected serious poems as their official picks use their introductory essays to take us back in time to their earliest awareness of words. “My mother claimed that the first poem I adored was Vachel Lindsay’s ‘The Moon’s the North-Wind’s Cookie,’ which she read me from an anthology called ‘Silver Pennies,’” writes Donald Hall. By the time he was 14, he had discovered H.D., and he includes one of her poems as his selection, but it’s hard to entirely forget his earlier, less glamorous love, which makes his entry here all the more valuable. Similarly, Daniel Halpern paints a boisterous and charming portrait of himself as a toddler bellowing song lyrics as he makes his way toward the Wallace Stevens poem he includes:

Before I acquainted myself with actual poems, I fell in love with song lyrics. At three, I played “That Old Black Magic” and “Cocktails for Two” by Spike Jones over and over on a “starter” record player at five in the morning … And in the late afternoon I rode my tricycle back and forth outside the house in which I was born in Syracuse with a strange fierceness, singing the songs of our armed forces (my father was a B-52 navigator during World War II): “Anchors aweigh …,” “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder …”

And speaking of lyrics, Eleanor Wilner has the guts to come right out and lay claim to “The Lady Is a Tramp” as her first favorite poem. “Not poetry, you say?” she jeers in her essay. “Back off. It was the Midwest, the middle class, mid-century America … The great song lyricists were my first poets, and musical comedy was my text.”

There are many choices here that wouldn’t make it onto any fancy lists of poems. Carol Moldaw writes about slipping her first copy of e.e. cummings’ “Collected Poems” into a box being packed up by a boy she liked when she was 17. “What better way to signal — though I knew we might never see each other again — the intensity of my unsung passion?” The relief I felt when I got to Moldaw’s page is hard to describe. No one ever admits to loving cummings — no poet wants to be caught appreciating hopelessly sentimental poetry that was in a Woody Allen movie — and yet we’ve all loved it. I spent about a year obsessing over a group of cummings poems simply because I was madly infatuated with the person who read them to me over the telephone. (One of them, in fact, was about hearing the voice of your beloved over the telephone, which is a perfect illustration of why cummings poems lend themselves so well to romances of the Highly Dramatic Type.) I still like to read cummings sometimes, just to loll in the memories of being a teenager in reckless love. As Moldaw, who chose cummings’ “i thank You God for this most amazing,” finishes up her essay: “What poems could be more like first love itself than cummings’, which vibrate in their certainty of every moment’s and each emotion’s uniqueness?”

Because the truth is that poets, just like everyone else, are fools when they fall in love. The essays in “First Love” that speak the most clearly about how one becomes a poet aren’t really about poetry at all. They’re about muddling through life and looking for people to help you figure out what the hell is going on in your heart. Some people just take the guidance, and others, as Marie Howe writes about reading Gwendolyn Brooks, think, “Oh I want to do that — what this woman here has done.”

Most important, “First Loves” demonstrates something that John Cheever wrote about in his brilliant, wrenching journals (which have as much claim to the title “poetry” as anything I’ve ever read). “There is some wonderful seriousness to the business of living,” he jotted down in 1958, “and one is not exempted by being a poet. You have to take some precautions with your health. You have to manage your money intelligently and respect your emotional obligations. There is another world — I see this — there is chaos, and we are suspended above it by a thread. But the thread holds.”

No matter how easy it is to believe that gifted poets do nothing but wander through the world accepting prizes and reading in sonorous voices, viewing everything through the sublime prism that produces their work, the truth is that they pay taxes and buy gas and groceries just like the rest of us. They bungle their “emotional obligations” — often spectacularly — and make mistakes and have to start over again, too. Perhaps what makes “First Loves” such a rare achievement is the way it slipped in behind the scenes and came back with the message that to be a poet is simply to be a person who never stops falling in love with the world, whose world is big enough to include even those things we love in spite of ourselves.

Back on the luxury cruise liner in 1973, my friend was so enmeshed in this tale, so convinced that she, too, was living in a log cabin and wearing a patched, hand-me-down calico dress, that when she joined her parents for dinner in the ship’s dining room she insisted on having a baked potato. Naturally, it had to be plain. Her parents — whom she had started to call “Ma” and “Pa” — were mystified.

“It was solidarity with Laura,” she explained to me, years later. “It was absolutely crucial that I showed my allegiance to her. It made total sense to me.”

And, despite the decades that have elapsed since I last read the Little House series, it made total sense to me, too.

I, too, once enacted private demonstrations of my loyalty to Laura Ingalls Wilder that were misunderstood, or just plain missed, by the world at large. It didn’t matter that her story unfolded in another century and another, rural setting. To me, she was simply a girl like myself — a girl with straight brown hair and a tendency to run just a little bit wild. I can remember waking up one morning in my native Manhattan, all ready to go out and roast a pig’s tail over an open fire, just the way the Ingalls family did. It seemed only natural. Concrete? Gone. Takeout Chinese? Never heard of it. More than anything, I longed to see someone construct a log cabin by hand.

Of course, pig’s tails are rather hard to come by in modern-day Manhattan. But even though I never got around to lighting that particular barbecue, I truly believed that I knew what it would be like to do it.

Laura was not alone. Like many little girls who grow up reading far into the night by flashlight, I had a whole coterie of literary friends who dwelled somewhere in the liminal space between imaginary and real. These fictional girls, much more than my actual peers, were the friends who advised me and challenged me to think about things outside the world that I already knew. All the real girls I knew were a lot like me, after all. I wanted to know what else — and who else — was out there.

And so I met Betsy Ray, the gap-toothed heroine of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series, set in Minnesota at the turn of the century. In a world of housewives and mothers, Betsy wanted to be a writer. (There was no lack of determined little girls in that household — her sister Julia wanted to be an opera singer.) She kept a cigar box filled with paper and pencils nailed up in the V of a tree in her yard, and went up there to write when the spirit moved her. Later, her mother transformed an old theatrical costume trunk into a desk for Betsy, which seemed to me to be just about the best thing a writer could possess.

Betsy and her friends, Tacy and Tib, made up a deliciously symmetrical trio — a blond, a brunet and a redhead — which appealed to my sense of equality, although such balance never seemed to occur in real life. They were always having exotic adventures. When they were 10 years old, they fell in love with the king of Spain. In “Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill” they write him a letter that reads:

We are all in love with you and would like to marry you but we can’t, because we’re not of the blood royal. Tib especially would like to marry you because she has a white accordion-pleated dress.

These girls had guts! They knew their chances were slim, but they took a shot anyway. Though I was not particularly interested in falling in love with anyone myself, I knew chutzpah when I read it. There I was, living in the big city, and all I did was traipse back and forth to school every day. It had never even occurred to me to fall in love with a prince, much less a king. But after reading about these girls’ ambitious plans, I vowed to think big. My world had expanded irreversibly.

Then there was Petrova Fossil, my favorite of the three orphans in Noel Steatfield’s “Ballet Shoes,” set in London in the ’20s and ’30s. She and her sisters, Pauline and Posy, had been adopted by an archaeologist who subsequently disappeared for many years, forcing the girls to train as performers in order to provide for themselves. Petrova was surrounded by ballerinas and actresses, but she wanted to be a car mechanic or a pilot. Midway through the book, a friendly garage owner who boards in the Fossil house gives Petrova “a suit of jeans, just like garage men wear, only, of course, her size.”

Prior to reading these words, I had never dreamed that such garb existed in my size. I was the only girl in my class at school who had a collection of Matchbox cars, and I had a burgeoning interest in mechanics myself. At last, I had a friend who understood.

As happy as I always was for Petrova, who hated her dance classes vehemently, I envied her as well. And so I did what any envious little girl would do: I imitated her. Every time we stopped at a gas station on family road trips, I went in to see what the mechanics were doing. I collected pamphlets on car repair and dreamed of opening a repair shop with my father some day. I had the feeling that Petrova, wherever she was, was looking upon my actions approvingly, and her existence gave me courage. Sometimes, in the cool of those gas station garages, I held consultations with her in my head about things like carburetors and fuel lines. Later on, when I was in high school, I joined a group of boys who were rebuilding an old engine after school under the guidance of a Latin teacher. I would be lying if I said that Petrova didn’t come to mind once or twice during those long sessions with pistons and greasy rags. She had survived my adolescence intact.

And somewhere, right now, I bet there’s a little girl asking her mystified parents for a pair of garage mechanic’s overalls.