During her tenure as United States poet laureate, Ada Limón spoke about the necessary role poetry plays in the public spirit. In interviews, she said that poetry has the power to carry the weight of public crises. Griefs. That it addresses itself to us as to a suffering human race, a species with emotions. She often said that one poem, on a single page, could make it possible for us to carry on.

What a very good description of Limón’s own work this set of beliefs charts. Limón’s poems are part pharmacy, part place of worship, part clearing in the woods. Reading one can be like stopping on a summer day when you’re exhausted and a breeze happens to kick up. They are good medicine. They are good fun. And they make you want to fall in love the way all great rock anthems do. Now, at last, there’s a selected volume of them.

Selected collections are like jukeboxes, and every night, among a different crowd, they will play a slightly different set of tunes. Here are mine. I love the way Limón writes about love as though it’s a do-or-die endeavor, as if all of our memories, the best, are burned into existence by it. I also believe she is one of our best poets of being in the natural world, moving the human “I” to the side just enough so we can see what’s around us.

In Startlement: New and Selected Poems, which collects 20 years of work—poems from six collections, along with new ones in the title section—you get to the love first. In fact, beginning with the first section, titled after her debut, Lucky Wreck, and then proceeding to her novel in verse, This Big Fake World, a tale of a lonely man drowning in longing, the book opens with some of her best ballads of desire and its consequences. They are poems of encounter, of risk. Throughout, Limón writes like a contortionist who can’t decide if she wants to get in or out of things. Or, as she puts it in the exquisite “The Spider Web,” “I watch as the spider comes close like a spy, / Unsure if I am jealous of the web or the fly.”

The way Limón’s poems swing between ravishment and offering means that when they find that spot in between—a moment of pure balance, of stillness—it feels like a satori. In her work, these caesuras in the regular fabric of reality are often prompted by a shift in light, in seasons, in time. The power of something breaks a spell or a spiral, and then suddenly a poem will deliver a line like “He walks to the corner and is surprised / by a late snow fall, the sky endlessly giving.” What an astounding description of the way snow, especially first snows, can arrive like endless generosity.

The third section, titled after Sharks in the Rivers, begins to address the wreck of the planet we live under, the state of alarm it produces. “All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles,” she writes. “The pulled apart world scatters / its bad news like a brush fire,” begins another poem in this section. But it turns almost immediately away from doom, or fear-surfing. “What’s left of the woods is closing in,” that poem continues. “Don’t run.”

The poet is speaking to herself here, as well as to us. Stuck in the early, already damaged part of a young woman’s life, where loss has perforated a sense of immensity, the poems in “Sharks in the Rivers” chronicle a slow, zigzagging awakening. An ugly, grumpy bird speaks to her in one poem. She remembers back to the solace a tree gave her as a child: “I liked the shadows cast in gobo-leaf prints on my bare limbs.” This era of poems reads like a love letter to every city-stuck soul. Even just the title of one of her poems can be soothing: “Ways to Ease Your Animal Mind.”

So much pain in life comes from consciousness and ego, and like her great mentors, Sharon Olds and Marie Howe, Limón has found a way to write about the struggle to let these things go. Even when pain marks us. Within this arc of life, the natural creates new models, new ways of envisioning a self, an existence. “I like the lady horses best,” Limón writes in “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” the first poem from her Bright Dead Things, which she includes here.

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big,
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?

What a clinic in the yoked power of syntax this poem is, the way those two short phrases in the first line gather a kind of doubt, only to be exploded as the lines begin to run over the breaks, coursing with energy that can only be brought to a full stop, at last, by the word blood. Limón’s prosody figuratively begins to gallop here. When she switches voices back into the vernacular—Don’t you want to believe it?—the vision of that eight-pound horse heart lingers like a spell, like a kind of hallucination. The poem is a 21st-century cousin to Olds’s great poem “The Language of the Brag,” which gathers a lifetime full of sandlot rejections and poor knife throws to say, Hey, I have brought life into this world. See if you can top that!

The collection Bright Dead Things sometimes feels like the hinge in Limón’s work, when the guitar-solo licks of her early lovesick poems give way to a greater power that seems to speak through her. In the poems of the section titled after this book, she sees the landscape afresh in part because it was new. She had just moved to Kentucky, and poems like “What It Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use” work with a whole new lexicon of imagery, of ruination, or splendid rot. And also actual death.

The poems here tip so quickly from a shock of the new to the rupture of grief that you can watch the poet’s eye turn toward morbidity. “Witness the wet dead snake,” the poem “Torn” begins, “its long hexagonal pattern weaved / around its body like a code for creation.” What a supremely fine description that is of the way a snake is only itself, how it does not need to know it is a snake to exist. Its coherence and beauty come from the simple way its design and itself are one in the same. Moving between shopping markets and outdoor spaces, domestic rooms and family situations, Limón’s poems from Bright Dead Things bring us, over and over again, to the lip of perception, where we can appreciate how much has been lost in the human quest for dominion, the overprivileging of the eye, the underdevelopment of our sense of the collective.

A few years ago, Limón edited a collection of poems about poets writing about the wild. During the publication, she spoke to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and said, “We are animals living on a planet with other animals and plants. I really want to challenge the idea of separateness because that, to me, feels like where we do the most harm—when we feel like we are completely separate from nature.” As Startlement deepens, there is a significant shift, one away from the eye and toward connection.

I’ve come here from the rocks, the bone-like chert,
obsidian, lava rock. I’ve come here from the trees—

chestnut, bay laurel, toyon, acacia, redwood cedar,

one thousand oaks
 that bend with moss and old-man’s beard.
I was born on a green couch on Carriger Road between
 the vineyards and the horse pasture.

I don’t remember what I first saw, the brick of light
 that unhinged me from the beginning.

By the time she wrote these lines in The Carrying, Limón was past 40, which is late for a creation myth of a poem like this, but perhaps she was beginning again: seeing herself again in a new (and an old) context as an indelible part of the place she came from. She is also, in this period of time, a woman struggling with infertility, and “Carrying” shows how we all carry grief and happiness, our places, and the recent history of our lives. This poem is one of her most elegant to date. Its slim lines fold with perfect joinery into the next. The poet is heartsick and standing outside with her aging dog. Her attention boomerangs out into the universe and then brings itself back on each return, as if watching from a new form—the sky, the winter smoke. From afar, she could be a fence post, a piece of holly. And from this diminishment, the poem arcs outward again, showing the reader the night, the farm, Kentucky, a nearby mare. Limón performs this cosmological pirouette with such grace that it feels like a mercy to the reader. As in, you, too, might hurt now, and you, too, are part of something larger.

Limón returns to two forms again and again in Startlement. Her prose poems and others arranged like text blocks, akin to those of the longtime Fresno resident Philip Levine. When a poem is compressed into one long, somewhat thin block, it acquires a force within it, a churning, and Limón harnesses this energy with great skill, especially in the bestiary that enters the poems of her last full collection, The Hurting Kind. Foxes and crows, kestrels, a madrone tree come to life before our eyes, and sometimes the poet is there, too, showing us herself watching, and at other times, she recedes to such a degree that it feels as though she has turned her calling into a simple one. Opening the window, calling the reader outside, where the language describing such living creatures is so alive it seems to want to run off the page. The way such poems live beside other ones about her father, her Mexican grandfather, her compatriots she watches sports with, gives this section of the book a pleasing creaturely feel. It is the opposite of anthropology. It is a vision of how we, too, are animals of habit and pattern, how we can be observed, how part of love, deep love, is taking that observing seriously—and with humor. “As a child, I once cried when he shaved it,” Limón writes of her father’s mustache.

How refreshing it is that as Limón’s life as a poet grows longer, these drinks from the well of the past grow deeper, cooler, the way time can if you’re lucky. The long-ago past emerges in some of the new poems with a spooky proximity. The poet’s “skittering mind,” referenced in “Let Loose,” refuses still to give up control, and yet the occult power of an image—and the world it comes from—always takes over the poems. “Crow’s Feet” shows how flimsy an idea is, how even an idea of nature that lives adjacently to Wallace Stevens’s notion of the sublime, set down on a Tennessee hill, is brushed away by the awesome and dynamic power of the elemental, of mortality.

I’m holding some wild
idea of unity, conviction, like a jar
of pollywogs, so carefully carried,
so full of potential, live, live I say,
quietly to the jar, which isn’t a jar
but my own pounding invocation,
I am not fading, but becoming
ungovernable. This train keeps
boasting its speed, the conductor
says, May you have a great day,
on purpose. On purpose hangs
in the car, all of us ransacked
by the bidding, watching our
faces be carried away and fast.

Limón, the romantic, the love-drunk balladeer of bad decisions, has emerged in midlife as a poet keenly aware of the limits of will, even when doing the right thing, when noticing her place in the world. Learning to inhabit her habitat, these poems describe, is not an evolution charted by logic. Understanding, or a power akin to it, which doesn’t seek to answer questions, emerges in bursts. It’s just as Olds described the best images arriving: They could never be made. They can only be received. Startlement’s title poem describes this kind of reception best. “It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure / of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard / skittering off his sun-spot rock, the flicker / of an unknown bird by the bus stop.” Limón is too wise a poet to use skittering twice in the book by accident. Indeed, we are alike yet unlike creatures in ways her work is still finding their way toward, searching for a language to address. “All words become wrong,” she writes in “The Origin Revisited.” “A whole world exists / without us.” Indeed it does, it has, and it will. But poems like this help us remember how to see this world, a gift Limón possesses that is as mysterious as wind, as real as the damp air in the woods near where she came from.•

Join us on November 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Limón will sit down with special guest Matthew Zapruder and host John Freeman to discuss Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Register for the Zoom conversation here.