I’m a fan of narrative poems, poems that tell a story. As I see it, that’s how poetry started, with epic poems that had to be memorized to be passed down, as people didn’t have printing presses or ...

The American writer, who won a Nobel Prize in 2020, wrote with cool clarity and often puckish wit. By Gregory Cowles Gregory Cowles is a senior editor at the Book Review, where he has also been the ...