In an increasingly interdependent world, we need our poets to provide us moments of wonder so we don’t become overwhelmed and nihilist. Let’s start with a voice new to me. In Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, translated by Susan Stewart (Princeton, 144 pages, $19.95), one of modern Italy’s finest poets can be as jumpy, winsome and fierce as Plath, but, as Stewart suggests, Merini’s “metaphysical frame” has been crucial. Even her aphorisms speak from the middle of things: “I never let myself / be excluded / from myself.” In “Elegy,” she recalls to the page her “open soul, / lacerated by love, / or the symptoms of God’s angels, / the heart’s painful returns.”

In her recent chapbook Sheer (The Barnwood Press, 31 pages, $9), Martha Collins continues to refine the plurivocal technique that made her 2006 volume Blue Front (Graywolf, 94 pages, $14) such an eye-opener. A most courageous and elegant explorer of carnal and metaphysical interdependencies, she remains balanced by a primal awareness of otherness. Here’s “Benediction”:

“Not a story, they said, not even a line. / And there wasn’t a line, there was a circle. / A perfect circle, though there were breaks. / But it wasn’t broken, it was open. / It was open in the spaces between — / It was open in the spaces between them. / And they were like candles, giving light. / But the light came from the length of their bodies. / And they were like lilies, that opened their throats. / And as they opened they almost touched. / And they threw back their heads, and the circle widened. / And there was silence, but they were singing.”

Practical Water (Wesleyan, 103 pages, $22.95) is part of Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy of the elements — earth, air, water, and fire; like Merini and Collins, Hillman’s voice echoes with otherness. Subject to continual breakdown — and breakthrough — her voice is grounded in resistance and wonder, absurdity and joy. Her political voice is pitch perfect and I want her to run for president.

Her eye for wild things partakes of radical innocence while remaining all-too-human: “buffleheads like reversed Oreos”! There’s simply too much variety to even suggest the dimensions of this book here. “Hydrology of California,” one of the long poems, reminded me of “Hang Gliding” by Grammy award-winner Maria Schneider. Go ahead: listen to “Hang Gliding” on You Tube to see what I mean, then buy Practical Water and read it, read it, read it. You’ll want Brenda for president, too.

tom.develyn@comcast.net