Poetry We Admire: Tribute to Late Poets
By Sara Dudo
In this Poetry We Admire column, we highlight the work of poets who have recently passed in 2026. Since fall is underway, we sought to appreciate their lines on seasons, life and death, and times of transition; to honor them, and to enjoy the beautiful poetry they’ve left behind. We hope this encourages our emerging and established writers alike to see the lasting impact of poetry, and to continue sharing their work with the world!
“A NATURAL HISTORY OF GETTING THROUGH THE YEAR”
Annie Dillard was a nonfiction writer and poet. She is best known for her nonfiction books Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), winner of a Pulitzer Prize, An American Childhood (1987), For the Time Being (1999), and The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (2016), and her poetry collections Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974) and Mornings Like This: Found Poems (1995). Her influences included Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, as is seen in Dillard’s lyrical style that explores nature, botany, the study of insects and small creatures, daily life, and literature. Most recently, she was a professor emeritus at Wesleyan University. She passed on September 15, 2026.
“September 2” and “Grace”
Wendell Berry was a poet, novelist, and environmentalist from Kentucky, where he owned and worked his farm for half of his life. He wrote over 50 books, including the genres of poetry, fiction, and critical essays. Renowned for his poetry on the everyday moments that make up a life and the light and beauty to be found in those moments, his work won countless awards, including the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Books Critics Circle, the National Humanities Medal (awarded by Barack Obama), the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He was notably interested in environmental activism and rejected modern technology and agribusiness, instead focusing on the sanctity of small farms for the individual and for the community. Some of his collections of poetry include Given (2005), Entries: Poems (1994), Traveling at Home (1989), The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1988), Collected Poems 1957-1982 (1985), Clearing (1977), There Is Singing Around Me (1976), and The Broken Ground (1964). He passed on August 31, 2026.
“Almost an Invitation”by Carol Rumens
Come nearer, gentle green
monotone, let me discern
Horsetail from grass, and the fine line between
all grassy species.
Cow Parsley, bring your bright white coral crumbs,
and Meadowsweet, lift clouded silvery fountains;
grow tall as girlhood, hide the dark old mountains.
Sun-yellow Lion-Tooth, toil,
bite back all that was taken
in hand by hands like mine that drove
iron into your soil.
Tell us the time again, blue Shepherd’s Bell;
forgive us the flocks we fleeced
for lotions, lagging, motor-oil:
and you, bold sapling Oak
and pioneering Birch, once dispossessed,
dig in, enjoy my field!
Feel free to stretch, to rise, but oh, don’t build
too near the sky, don’t poke
those high ancestral lines, the super-power
which is my fire my light my song my sanction
to love and live the multiple transactions
of one blown human flower.
Carol Rumens was a British poet, and taught Creative Writing at University of Kent at Canterbury, Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork, Stockholm University, University of Hull, and University of Wales, Bangor. She was Poetry Editor for Quarto and the literary Review in the 80’s. In The Guardian, she wrote the “Poem of the Week” column from 2007 until her death). Notable awards include Belfast Arts Award for Literature (shortlist, 1998), Forward Poetry Prize (shortlist, 1998 and 2002), fourth prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition (2001), and the National Poetry Competition (2001). Rumens wrote 16 collections, including Unplayed Music (1981), Star Whisper (1983), Selected Poems (1987), The Greening of the Snow Beach (1988), Hex (2002), Poems, 1968 – 2004 (2004), and Animal People (2016). She passed on April 25, 2026.
from “In The Can Where She Keeps The Sugar” from Dark and Perfect Angels
Woman, you sit in your kitchen, permanent place
In life, the food you prepared all around you.
Always a harvest. The cold wind knocks. You
Do not let it enter. Where you work, it is warm.
You measure the red paper with your eyes as your hands
Tightly tape the toys. The years, hard as Aztec onyx,
Hit your face. They bruise. Your woman’s work
Fences in the wind within, pushes back the tears
To the far said of your eyes where none can see them
But your God. You wait like your sleeping children.
For them, there will be food and laughter long
As you are there. Always a harvest. You sit, look
Into the night, think of the lost-eyed man you married
That autumn when the cotton was ready and soft.
The picking was bad that year. Many crops have
Been planted, been plowed under since that time
Of love. The fields wait to be seeded, watered,
Wait to be touched by spring again.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz was a poet, novelist, and children’s author born and raised in New Mexico. Before becoming a writer, he earned a BA in Humanities and Philosophy from St. Thomas Seminary, studied theology at the University of Louvain, and served as a priest in El Paso, Texas for a couple years. Later, he received his MA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and PhD at the University of Iowa at Stanford University, where he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and wrote his first poetry collection, Calendar of Dust (1991). Sáenz wrote four other poetry collections, which include Dark and Perfect Angels (1995), Elegies in Blue (2002), Dreaming the End of War (2006), and The Book of What Remains (2010). He also wrote several short story collections and children’s books. He passed on July 28, 2026.
“Epitaphs” from Fits of Concision: Collected Poems of Six or Fewer Lines
I who in life stood upright as a tree
Have found a still more basic way to be.
—
Dirt was I made from, back to dirt I went.
Envy me now. I’m in my element.
—
The hardest part of dying is to turn
Your back on that deep calm for which you burn.
X.J. Kennedy was a poet and children’s book author known for his intriguing and often humorous work that often highlighted modern life, loss, and desire. He wrote many collections, including Nude Descending a Staircase (1961), Breaking and Entering (1971), Dark Horses: New Poems (1992), In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems (2007), Fits of Concision: Collected Poems of Six or Fewer Lines (2014), and That Swing: Poems, 2008–2016 (2017). During his writing career, he spent time as a journalist in the US Navy’s Atlantic Fleet, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, worked as the poetry editor at the Paris Review from 1962–64, and taught at the University of Michigan, Wellesley, Tufts, Leeds, and elsewhere. Kennedy and his wife also worked together on textbooks and edited a poetry magazine, Counter/Measures. He passed on February 1, 2026.