Bartlett's Poems for Occasions Book

I picked up this book because I was looking for, well, poems for various occasions. Poems to send into the world to acknowledge birthdays, bereavements, weddings, and various seasons. I didn't find much that I would want to share with others on these occasions. I found that, for the most part: The poems that spoke of birth and birthdays were not celebratory. The poems about grief were not comforting. The poems about seasons did not evoke the season they spoke of.

As a poetry anthology, this book is middling at best. It skews toward the hardscrabble and the melancholic, toward admonishments and depression... which is fine, as poetry does and should cover the whole of human experience. But as it specifically calls itself a collection of "poems for occasions," I'm measuring it with a different yardstick. And I have to say that on the whole, I hope nobody chooses from this when writing to me to commemorate a particular occasion.